Category: Actualités EN

OIP once again regrets Google’s delaying tactics, which have led it to continue its anti-competitive practices, and reiterates its call for interim measures to be taken as soon as the litigious behavior becomes known, so that it can be brought to an end immediately.

As the EU court has confirmed, preferential treatment is a prohibited discriminatory practice, and condemned as so. OIP, along with all European digital players, has been calling on the regulator for the past ten years to fight these illegal practices strongly and swiftly against all tech players abusing their dominant position! Google’s appeal against the judgement shows that these tech giants have no intention of respecting the startup ecosystem, which can only exist with free, fair and undistorted competitive conditions.

This resignation comes just hours after a parliamentary hearing during which the Commission Vice-President responsible for competition, Margrethe Vestager, did not dispel any doubts as to the appropriateness of the appointment.

It was impossible to maintain such an appointment, given that the hearing revealed that all Fiona Scott Morton’s conflicts of interest – in particular with major US companies – had still not been listed by the Commission, that the list would be kept confidential, and that no security clearance would be issued. The Chief Competition Economist has access to the entire European judicial strategy in the fight against abuses of dominant positions, and it was of course incongruous to ask the USA to ensure the probity of its own national. Appointing an American, and for the first time in the history of the European Union departing from the principle of appointing only citizens of the European Union to key administrative positions, was a mistake that seriously undermined the EU’s ambition for sovereignty.

OIP is grateful for the commitment of the French authorities, and first and foremost that of President Emmanuel Macron, who forcefully reiterated the importance of defending Europe’s strategic autonomy. From the outset, Minister Jean-Noël Barrot took up the issue, understanding all the stakes involved, and called for the appointment to be withdrawn. OIP also welcomes the exceptional mobilization of parliamentarians, civil society, and professional organizations.

The association now hopes that a new Chief Competition Economist will soon be appointed, and that the work accomplished by Margrethe Vestager and her teams in the fight against abuses of position by international digital giants will continue and intensify. The coming into force of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an important moment for the European digital industry, and OIP has high expectations of its implementation by the European Commission.

Last year, the association succeeded in unifying many French and European cloud players, with the common objective of bringing together all the companies that represent the cloud value chain in France and Europe. Cloud Temple’s membership is an additional step within the OIP, which the members are delighted about.

For nearly 20 years, Cloud Temple’s mission has been to guarantee digital confidence by placing security and sovereignty in the centre of the information systems of industrial and public players. To achieve this, Cloud Temple provides long-term support for the digital transformation of its customers, and provides them a cloud environment that meets the highest standards of security and sovereignty. Its sovereign cloud platform is SecNumCloud qualified and HDS certified.

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!