Elon Musk's X escapes tough EU competition rules

BRUSSELS: Tech billionaire Elon Musk's X platform will not face the EU's stringent competition rules aimed at keeping digital markets open, the European Commission said on Wednesday.

The landmark European Union law forces the world's biggest digital firms to comply with a set of requirements for how they should behave including giving users more choices in a bid to challenge their dominance.

The rules known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) apply to designated "gatekeepers", which since March have included Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Facebook's Meta and Microsoft.

Online travel agent Booking was added to the list in May.

X had challenged being added to the list, saying that it was not an "important gateway" for businesses to reach consumers. The EU then launched a probe in May into X's rebuttal.

Now the commission, the EU's digital watchdog, has "concluded that X does indeed not qualify as a gatekeeper" because the probe found "business users do not consider that they are dependant on X" to reach consumers online.

The DMA is part of the EU's strengthened legal armoury to bring big tech to heel. One of its main goals is to give regulators greater oversight before it is too late.

For example, the gatekeepers must tell the EU about any plans to buy a company, which in the past frustrated competition regulators as firms often scooped up potential rivals before they became a threat.

The law also forces the giants to offer choice screens for web browsers and search engines to give users more options.

Although Musk has escaped the DMA's crosshairs, his X platform still faces fierce scrutiny under mammoth content moderation rules, and even the risk of a large fine.

In July, the EU said X was violating the rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) in a preliminary finding that found the platform was deceiving users with its blue checkmarks for certified accounts.

The probe under the DSA into X is wide-ranging and the EU is also looking at how the platform tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation.

For each offence, the commission can slap a fine of up to six percent of the annual worldwide turnover of the service "provider".