Andrea Nahles, President of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). (picture alliance/Christophe Gateau/dpa/archive)
Andrea Nahles, the leader of the center-left Social Democrats, has backed the idea of a "data-for-all" law to limit the power of the big digital corporations. "If we want to prevent Google and Co. from exploiting their monopoly position at the expense of companies and consumers in the future, we need innovative instruments," she wrote in an opinion piece in the financial daily "Handelsblatt" on Monday.
Under the law, as envisaged by Nahles, a company would be obliged - as soon as it exceeds a fixed market share for a certain period of time - to publicly share an anonymous and representative part of its precious data hoard. Other companies and start-ups could then use this data to develop their own business ideas and bring them to market as products. "The data will then no longer belong exclusively to Google, but to everyone," Nahles explained.
Criticism of the dominance of the so-called GAFA companies - Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple - is nothing new. New York marketing professor Scott Galloway, for example, has long called for the destruction of the companies, which he describes as monopolists.
Nahles, whose SPD party is in government with Angela Merkel’s conservatives, did not rule out such a possibility as a last resort. "If the Internet multinationals do not face up to their responsibility for the social market economy and fair competition, we in the EU will have to discuss whether it is necessary to break up the companies," she wrote.
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