Author: Anaïs Strauss

According to the American press, the antitrust proceedings initiated by the Department of Justice could result in a recommendation to dismantle Google and its head company Alphabet. The Open Internet Project has long been convinced that the concentration in Google’s hands of the dominant activities of publishing service platforms (such as e-mail or video), advertising services, publishing the web browser, search engine, mobile operating system or distributing mobile applications can only lead Google to abuse this confusion, to the detriment of free and undistorted competition.

This is illustrated by the large number of condemnations of Google. The OIP therefore believes that a dismantling of the Alphabet group and a splitting of Google’s activities into several legally, economically and technologically independent entities would be an effective and necessary solution, provided that such a dismantling is accompanied by the implementation of “algorithmic remedies”, i.e. remedies prohibiting the new entities resulting from the dismantling from using algorithms allowing them to combine their data on a large scale.

Besides Google’s competitors in digital advertising, the victims of these practices are the traditional media, which see the fair revenues to which they are entitled in the digital advertising market slip away in the opacity of billions of second transactions.

The Open Internet Project (OIP) association is very pleased to welcome École Hexagone as a new member! This is the first time that a school forming our future engineers, computer scientists and developers joins the OIP, in order to participate actively in the work and actions of the association, aiming to denounce and correct the abuses of dominant position, while extending its prerogatives to the issues related to education.

Indeed, many French schools that train students for digital professions work closely with American tech giants, “locking” their students into American software ecosystems, who later in their professional careers often become natural ambassadors for these solutions in the companies that hire them. At the end of their training, many graduates leave France or the European Union to be hired by the American tech giants, who often offer very high salaries that they compensate by their business practices based on dominant positions, which their French competitors cannot match.

The Hexagone School, Great School of French Digital Sovereignty, created in 2020, currently has two campuses in France, in Clermont-Ferrand and Versailles, and will have nearly 200 students at the beginning of the school year. The academic programs of the 4 tracks; Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Master’s degrees in Information Systems Architecture, Artificial Intelligence and Cyberdefense, are built around and with French publishers and manufacturers; Stormshield, 3DS Outscale, Scaleway, HarfangLab, Olvid, etc.

All the members of the OIP welcome the Hexagon School!

Jamespot is a French startup that develops a complete internal communication and collaboration platform, expanding the list of OIP members that develop and host their digital solutions in Europe.

The European ecosystem of efficient and sovereign digital solutions continues to grow, which is an excellent signal not only for consumers, who benefit of innovative solutions, but also for public authorities, who are increasingly concerned with the issue of digital and technological sovereignty. Like many other OIP members, Jamespot faces a challenging competitive environment with abuse of dominant positions, which the association is committed to fight.

Jamespot is a provider of internal communication and collaboration solutions in the cloud. The Jamespot solution is an intranet, an internal social network or a digital workplace, according to the organizations that deploy it. It answers to all the needs and business challenges of its customers thanks to the modularity of its platform and its app store. In 2021, Jamespot has grouped its applications to compose 4 complete product suites: Open Agora – the internal social network, Fast Intranet – the communication intranet, Diapazone – meeting facilitation and WeDoc – online sovereign office automation. Jamespot supports the daily life of more than 400 organizations and 400,000 users around the world.

All the members of the OIP welcome Jamespot!

With this new member, OIP looks forward to continue to work on competitive issues related to the cloud marker. Indeed, OVHcloud, Scaleway and Clever Cloud – three emblematic and major players of the French cloud, committed to digital sovereignty and respect for market rules – wish to bring their expertise and share their visions of a competitive and fair European cloud market, and thus support the actions of OIP which aim to fight against any abuse of dominant position on tech markets.

OVHcloud is a global player and the European leader in the Cloud, operating more than 400,000 servers in 33 datacenters located on 4 different continents. Based on a unique integrated model, the group manages its entire value chain to deploy a more environmentally friendly cloud. This unique approach allows the company to innovate continuously to independently cover all the uses of its 1.6 million customers around the world. OVHcloudoffers the latest solutions that combine performance, price predictability and complete sovereignty over their data to support their growth in complete freedom.

All OIP members welcome OVHcloud and look forward to working together to pursue their common goals!

The European association Open Internet Project (OIP) welcomes the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which confirmed on 14 September 2022 that Google had indeed abused its dominant position, as the European Commission had ruled in the Android case back in 2018, following various complaints filed with the Commission, including OIP’s.

The Commission rightly considered that Google was imposing illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers in order to promote the use of its own search engine. Google was thus using its Android operating system to maintain the dominant position of its search engine. Moreover, in its decision, the CJEU notices that Google does not contest that the pre-installation of a search engine on an Android phone is ” likely to improve the results of the search services concerned”, which confirms that Google abused its dominant position to deny its competitors the possibility to improve their service, in detriment of consumers’ interest.