Regulation 2019/1150 - Promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 186/57

Online intermediation services are key enablers of entrepreneurship and new business models, trade and innovation, which can also improve consumer welfare and which are increasingly used by both the private and public sectors. They offer access to new markets and commercial opportunities allowing undertakings to exploit the benefits of the internal market. They allow consumers in the Union to exploit those benefits, in particular by increasing their choice of goods and services, as well as by contributing to offering competitive pricing online, but they also raise challenges that need to be addressed in order to ensure legal certainty.

Online intermediation services can be crucial for the commercial success of undertakings who use such services to reach consumers. To fully exploit the benefits of the online platform economy, it is therefore important that undertakings can trust online intermediation services with which they enter into commercial relationships. This is important mainly because the growing intermediation of transactions through online intermediation services, fuelled by strong data-driven indirect network effects, leads to an increased dependence of such business users, particularly micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), on those services in order for them to reach consumers. Given that increasing dependence, the providers of those services often have superior bargaining power, which enables them to, in effect, behave unilaterally in a way that can be unfair and that can be harmful to the legitimate interests of their businesses users and, indirectly, also of consumers in the Union. For instance, they might unilaterally impose on business users practices which grossly deviate from good commercial conduct, or are contrary to good faith and fair dealing. This Regulation addresses such potential frictions in the online platform economy.

Consumers have embraced the use of online intermediation services. A competitive, fair, and transparent online ecosystem where companies behave responsibly is also essential for consumer welfare. Ensuring the transparency of, and trust in, the online platform economy in business-to-business relations could also indirectly help to improve consumer trust in the online platform economy. Direct impacts of the development of the online platform economy on consumers are, however, addressed by other Union law, especially the consumer acquis.

Similarly, online search engines can be important sources of Internet traffic for undertakings which offer goods or services to consumers through websites and can therefore significantly affect the commercial success of such corporate website users offering their goods or services online in the internal market. In this regard, the ranking of websites by providers of online search engines, including of those websites through which corporate website users offer their goods and services to consumers, has an important impact on consumer choice and the commercial success of those corporate website users. Even in the absence of...