Speeches

Mr President, Mr Vice-President, dear colleagues, better law-making is a nice idea. We all share this view. That requires courage, deliberations, transparency and accountability. These goals of better law-making are undermined by the involvement of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board. This Board can stop legislative proposals internally up to the need to be overruled by the College of Commissioners. It has vetoed more than 40% of first-round impact assessment reports in recent years. It managed, by its double veto, to meaningfully water down the Commission proposal for a directive on corporate sustainability due diligence, as shown by an insightful report of the Corporate Europe Observatory. This report shows evidence of massive one-sided lobbying of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, which led to a narrowing-down of the scope and of the Director’s duties. We can discuss all these issues politically, but the place for these discussions and for these decisions to change the ambitious legislative process is here in the European Parliament, because we are elected by the citizens and accountable to them.

Mr President, Commissioners, ladies and gentlemen, Digital markets are disrupted. We have companies here who write the rules of the markets they dominate, whose access they control. Their services have become so important to people that they sell their proverbial souls to use these networks, these services. The soul in digital markets is our data. to collect, organize and from this precise profiles of us, the users; This is the source of the omnipotent position of these companies. Our previous swords, competition law and data protection law, have proven dull. In the Netherlands, for example, Apple would rather pay fines on a regular basis than change its business model. Therefore, it was necessary and right for us to DMA finally to provide instruments with which we can use data octopuses and unbridled Big techCompanies can control. Two achievements of DMA I want to highlight. First, messenger services must open up and allow messaging with customers of other messenger services. As a result, end-users can finally actually exercise their right to vote and choose the service that best protects their rights without actually being forced to choose only the service where everyone else is. Parents no longer have to sell their soul if they want to be part of the primary school parenting app. Secondly, the Commission has the right to adopt so-called structural measures if companies repeatedly fail to comply with our rules. It may prohibit them from buying up competitors and, in the worst case, ordering the dismantling of an undertaking. These are punishments that hurt and thus the behavior of the Big techCompanies will change. These innovations should also inspire the Commission to revise competition law and merger control. This creates the DMA The foundation for recovering digital markets and becoming a real game changer. For my group, I would like to dedicate this success to my predecessor Evelyne Gebhardt, who sits at the top of our visitors' stands today and who is responsible for DMA improved during the parliamentary procedure.

Dear Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Competition law is Europe's sharpest weapon for enforcing our rules of the game for markets. Economic power must not be in the hands of less, but markets must be democratized in which everyone can participate. This means more than promoting consumer welfare. Citizens expect markets to respect their privacy, protect their data, combat climate change and ensure sustainability. These findings mean that consumer welfare has become the sole objective of competition policy and that the price of a product is included in the moth box as a dominant factor in anti-competitive behaviour. Data does not have a price tag. The Digital Markets Act Goes in the right direction here. Competition law should now be inspired by him and recognise data protection and climate protection as competition problems. I also call for a reform of merger law, which gives the authorities the opportunity to smash anti-competitive companies. In this way, we make our exemplary competition law future-proof, so that it democratizes markets and protects citizens!

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen! A new word has found its way into the political language, a German word that expresses untranslatedly that everything is under political scrutiny: A turning point in time. A turning point is also in the relationship between the EU and China. China continues to avoid the full condemnation of Russian war crimes and relativizes the war of aggression in violation of international law. China opens its markets to Russian companies and becomes a war profiteer. The EU must not stick to China's dual strategy of blinking to the right and turning to the left. We must therefore reduce dependence on China's technologies and adopt and implement the Chips Act more quickly. We need to tackle human rights violations and environmental damage in supply chains. We need to dig the water away from China's strategy of taking the lead in global standard-setting with its own, effective and democratically legitimized standardization strategy. Turning point means that we need to become strategically autonomous from authoritarian states in our supply chains that are trampling on our values.