New European regulation for online platforms
Recently, European Union negotiators have been keen on establishing new rules to ensure the fairness of commercial practices on online platforms. These new measures are targeted at EU consumers who use all kinds of online services, ranging from online retail, to professional activities and even application development. Specifically, the new regulatory framework increases consumer confidence, predictability and legal certainty in the digital business environment.
In addition, there is a high probability that this new approach will broaden the choice and services offered to consumers, increasing online commercial competition and participating in better quality and lower prices of goods and services.
Transparency will also become a key element, since the consumer will be able to learn, in more detail, about the identity of the company offering the goods and services, and even if what is being offered is preceded by a payment campaign. The online search engines that are based on specific topic searches and in turn provide results in various formats corresponding to the search request (e.g. Google Search, Seznam.cz, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc.) are also included in the new regulations.
BISITE, our research group, has extensive experience in developing intelligent systems for these platforms, in which we incorporate Blockchain technology.
At IoT DIH we believe that this is a step in the right direction, to promote specific policies that help protect consumers and legitimate traders.
For more information:
Factsheet: Online platforms – new rules to increase transparency and fairness
