A coalition of 31 groups and academics, including Privacy International and consumer group BEUC, addressed a letter on Tuesday to EU lawmakers requesting last-minute changes in the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to allow individual users to sue U.S. tech giants for violations of EU law.
The DMA is a law that establishes a list of activities that digital platforms exceeding certain revenue and user thresholds must comply with, or that they must restrain from doing. Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft will likely fall under the category of “gatekeeper” and will have to follow the rules.
However, this law only allows business users and not individual users to sue companies for possible violations.
“The DMA must enable users, both individually and collectively, to bring enforcement actions for violation of DMA rules before national courts,” the group said in an open letter to EU institutions.
The DMA was approved by the EU parliament in December after a few amendments to the text, and now it is in the last stage of the legislative process. The Council of the European Union, which represents the governments of the 27 member states, needs to ratify the text — and it is expected to do so before the summer.
Read More: EU Council May Push for DMA, DSA Approval Before Summer
Amendments at this moment of the legislative process are unlikely, as they would need new approvals from all the institutions before the text can be ratified. Last-minute amendments are possible if a member state strongly opposes some provisions of the law — and yet, it isn´t easy. In this case, consumer groups and academics may not have the same political leverage as a member state.
Besides, and more importantly for this request, individual users already have the right to sue big tech companies or any other companies for the damage they suffer as a result of a company´s wrongdoing. The difference is that individuals need to do so under national laws in each country, and they need to prove the damage in each of them. This new request may seek to enable users to sue Big Tech companies under EU law rather than national laws, and possibly, to file collective actions instead of individual suits.
Alternatively, instead of getting more rights to claim damages in national courts, consumer groups may be looking at expanding individuals’ rights to sue companies for competition law violations, which are essentially the type of violations foreseen in the DMA. Under EU law, only companies — and this includes individual people acting as a company or an association — may sue other companies for competition law violations. This is probably the reason why only business users and non-regular users are allowed to sue companies under the proposed DMA.
In recent years, the European Commission has introduced a few rules that facilitate both companies and individuals suing other companies for damages derived from competition law violations. For instance, EU decisions declaring that a company has violated competition law are enough evidence to go to any court in Europe and seek damages. Collective actions are also possible in EU countries — and while they are not as popular as in the U.S., where companies can ask for treble damages, there are an increasing number of cases across Europe.
EU institutions are likely to be sympathetic to the consumer groups, but there is probably not much they can do without either significantly delaying the adoption of the law or proposing an overhaul of the EU legal system.
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