What legislative and non-legislative policy options have been considered? Is there a preferred choice or not? Why?

The preferred option is a co-regulatory solution addressing issues identified on online platforms and in online general search. Regarding online platforms, the regulatory part combines a set of legally binding transparency obligations on platforms, an obligation to set up internal redress mechanisms, as well as provisions to allow for collective redress for associations representing businesses. This would be combined with a non-binding call to industry to establish an independent mediation body for complaints. Finally, an EU observatory for emerging problems, organised around an EU expert group will also be set up to monitor emerging trends and the evolution of problems. Regarding online general search engines, the preferred option is targeted to address the dependency induced by potentially harmful ranking practices. The measures foreseen are limited to scoped transparency obligation (limited to the single issue of ranking), and to legal standing for representative organisations to act on behalf of their business members.

Amongst the legislative policy options considered, co-regulatory solutions (combining legislative with non-legislative elements) as well as fully binding, mandatory rules without any voluntary components were considered. A fully binding solution would lay down exhaustive mandatory rules prohibiting the trading practices in question, combined with mandatory EU wide dispute resolution mechanism, and obligatory reporting by platforms to a fully-fledged regulatory agency (as has been proposed by a number of Member States). This has been discarded as disproportionate.

Purely non-legislative policy options considered focused on calls to industry to develop voluntary measures to address the most problematic trading practices, and to establish an industry commitment to improve access to redress for business users via self-regulation. An independent monitoring strategy would similarly rely on industry commitments to report on the effectiveness and evolution of the problems. This option was discarded as unlikely to fully meet the policy objectives.

Regarding transparency around rankings and data use, platforms would agree with high-level disclosure, but warn of "gaming" and manipulation of algorithms in case of too much transparency. General search engines already provide comprehensive guidance on how to optimize the ranking, but warn of the ineffectiveness of disclosing algorithms, not least in light of many and frequent changes to search algorithms, as well as on the risks to manipulation of search results.

Online platforms generally support self-regulatory measures and oppose binding rules as too burdensome on their business models, and disproportionate to the problems at hand. Experts responsible for the Digital Single Market as well as e-Commerce from Member States' administrations have expressed support for a co-regulatory, problem-driven approach, in principle.

Business users of online platforms generally support more far reaching, binding rules for the platform economy in order to increase their leverage over the relationships intermediated by online platforms. These include rules on delisting businesses, and transparency on discriminatory practices or ranking of apps, as well as rules on access to data in e-Commerce market places.

What are the benefits of the preferred option (if any, otherwise main ones)?