Is the Digital Markets Act really helping Google’s competition or just complicating things?
Has anyone noticed Google Maps wasn’t what it used to be? Whenever I look up a city I may be interested in exploring on my browser, I can’t click directly on it. Plus the “maps” tab doesn’t even appear under the search engine like it used to. This is the Digital Markets Act in play. This is the story of how a well-intentioned law, that once created doesn’t always land where it was aimed.
The EU’s Digital Markets Act designated Google a “gatekeeper” and banned it from self-referencing, from promoting its own services like maps above those of rivals in search results. The logic was that for years comparison sites, travel aggregators and rival map services complained that Google left them buried beneath their own panels, using its dominance in Google Search to lock web users into its own ecosystem. The DMA set out to change this status-quo.
Google complied with the act by stopping the preference of its own Maps and stripped out the convenient links that used to take you straight from a search result into Google Maps, or straight into a hotel or an airline’s own booking page. What came out was rival-populated units and honestly more dead ends. According to Google’s figures direct booking traffic to hotels and airlines fell by as much as 30%.
These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt as they come from Google itself and from an industry that lobbying hard against the changes. However, this does not change the fact that the compliance changes introduced fiction where they used to be a smooth path.
The logic of the DMA was meant to protect smaller players against Google dominance. But when you strip a hotel’s direct booking link out of search, the traveler is rerouted to large intermediary websites like Booking.com, who themselves are giants in their respective space. Essentially a regulation designed to level the playing field may have quietly handed traffic from smaller direct business to large platforms and making the search path clunkier than it needs to be.
Pro-competition regulation assumes that if you constrain the dominant player, the benefit flows to the small competitor and in effect, the consumer. Sometimes it does the trick, but sometimes the onus lands on the user and small businesses, and the winnings on the large intermediary that is best positioned to absorb the redirected traffic.
That is not to say that the DMA is wrong to exist. Google’s dominance is real and the case to contain is legitimate. But the maps debacle is a warning that regulating market and improving it are two different achievements. Europe has proven it can make these tech giants bend. Whether these changes serve the people is a harder question to ask and is not answered by good intentions alone.
#DMA #BigTech #Google #EURegulation #Antitrust
