The EU has a term for what steam is: a gatekeeper. Sure our current overlord is mostly benign, but at the end of the day that doesn’t mean they should be allowed free reign.
“On 6 September 2023 the European Commission designated for the first time six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft. In total, 22 core platform services provided by those gatekeepers have been designated.”
That’s a direct quote from their website. Perhaps you can elaborate on what specifically makes Valve a gatekeeper in this space, and why they have not been labeled one under EU law by the Digital Markets Act and those who enforce it?
I’m especially curious about how you came to this conclusion. I’m also curious about the do’s and don’t section of this article and what you might feel Valve has fallen afoul of as their obligations to the public and their competitors under this law.
Gatekeepers are large digital platforms providing any of a pre-defined set of digital services (‘core platform services’), such as online search engines, app stores, and messenger services. These companies have:
- a strong economic position, significant impact on the internal market and are active in multiple EU countries;
- a strong intermediation position, meaning that they link a large user base to a large number of businesses;
- an entrenched and durable position in the market, meaning that their position has been stable over time.
The only reason steam evaded the label is that they’re too small and the EU has bigger fish to fry atm.
Your quote contradicts your claim. Steam is not a platform, it’s just a store. The platform is Windows, Mac, or Linux.
I read the article. You don’t expect me to just take the quote at face value? You asserted that they fall into this category. So show us your work. How and why? A quote is not sufficient.
