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Comment by senorrib | Hacker News Reader

“ In particular, Apple – and Facebook – are gatekeepers because they “are digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”. Spotify is not in that position.”

How is Spotify not in that position? I see no difference between Facebook, Apple and Spotify in this case, except for the fact that they gatekeep different things.

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Spotify exceeds neither the revenue threshold of 7.5 billion euros nor the market cap threshold of 75 billion euros that is part of the definition of gatekeepers in Chapter II, Article 3 of the Digital Markets Act. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Even though they're a gateway between business users and condumers, they're not considered an important gateway because the music industry isn't big enough. (Or maybe Spotify's share of the EU music market is just too small.)

That threshold is precisely the problem in the first place. It is a weird and arbitrary limit that "just by coincidence" happens to target a bunch of really huge American companies.

Personally I hope it is that they just put that limit at the high number to warm up and then ratchet it down. But then they should say so.

Surely that limit is the result of some political discussion, thus arbitrary. But I think there is no scientific way of setting such limit, so any limit you come up with will be arbitrary.

> Surely that limit is the result of some political discussion, thus arbitrary.

The usual case is that the limit is certainly the result of political discussion, but not arbitrary. What you'd expect is that somebody made a list of targets, and then the thresholds were intentionally defined to include those targets and nobody else.

In political contexts involving purchasing, this is called "single-sourcing". In contexts involving persecution, it is more frowned upon, and I'm not aware of a general name for the practice. But it's not a different practice.

> What you'd expect is that somebody made a list of targets, and then the thresholds were intentionally defined to include those targets and nobody else.

Probably you're right, but the list of targets itself would be arbitrary, and likely was subject to discussion as well.

You can argue market cap isn’t there, but Spotify’s revenue in the EU far exceeds 7.5B Euro.

No idea how accurate this is, but according to https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/ in 2023 Spotify had €13.2B revenue globally, and 40.5% users in Europe. Assuming that revenue is spread equally (which is a big assumption) that means that Spotify’s revenue in the EU in 2023 was €5.3B.

Where did you get the “far exceeds” figure from?

I suspect a point to Gruber on that one - there is no logical reason to say that privacy impact is proportional to market cap or revenue. This is just the EU attempting to leverage their lack of high profile software companies.

All fair in love and war; but this article is fooling few on this being a matter of principle. It looks like protectionism.

The Digital Markets Act and gatekeeper designation are primarily about antitrust, not privacy. Hence the focus on financial criteria. For privacy, there's the GDPR.

Multiple reasons:

1. Size. DMA requirement is >=7.5b turnover in the EU, or worldwide market cap >=75b. Not the case for Spotify.

2. Non-provision of core platform services. It's not just "important gateway between business users and consumers", it's "important gateway between businesses and consumers *in relation to core platform services*". Core platform services are e.g. search engines, operating systems, browsers, app stores and so on. This is why Spotify isn't a gatekeeper.

And the exact same reasoning applies to American companies. Video streaming platforms like Netflix are also excluded for example, even though Netflix has a market cap >=75b.

Core platform services include "online intermediation services" and "video sharing platform services" both of which Netflix could be argued to count as. But I guess there are probably fewer than 10,000 EU businesses distributing content through Netflix?

I was under the impression that Netflix was not deemed video sharing platform because they don't actively dictate what is and is not allowed on the platform the way YouTube does. But maybe it was the 10,000 rule, who knows. To my knowledge the EU never made explicit why companies were not deemed gatekeeper.

At some point, labelling gatekeepers comes down to how many "gatekeepers" are there resources to go after.

Naming all potential gatekeepers would only set the EU up to look capricious when it still only had enough resources to go after its highest priority targets.

So there will never be an obvious rational line of who is in or out. Just the sued and unsued.

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