Recital 51

Vertical integration of gatekeepers (1/2)*

Gatekeepers are often vertically integrated and offer certain products or services to end users through their own core platform services, or through a business user over which they exercise control which frequently leads to conflicts of interest. This can include the situation whereby a gatekeeper provides its own online intermediation services through an online search engine. When offering those products or services on the core platform service, gatekeepers can reserve a better position, in terms of ranking, and related indexing and crawling, for their own offering than that of the products or services of third parties also operating on that core platform service. This can occur for instance with products or services, including other core platform services, which are ranked in the results communicated by online search engines, or which are partly or entirely embedded in online search engines results, groups of results specialised in a certain topic, displayed along with the results of an online search engine, which are considered or used by certain end users as a service distinct or additional to the online search engine.

Other instances are those of software applications which are distributed through software application stores, or videos distributed through a video-sharing platform, or products or services that are given prominence and display in the newsfeed of an online social networking service, or products or services ranked in search results or displayed on an online marketplace, or products or services offered through a virtual assistant. Such reserving of a better position of gatekeeper’s own offering can take place even before ranking following a query, such as during crawling and indexing. For example, already during crawling, as a discovery process by which new and updated content is being found, as well as indexing, which entails storing and organising of the content found during the crawling process, the gatekeeper can favour its own content over that of third parties. In those circumstances, the gatekeeper is in a dual-role position as intermediary for third-party undertakings and as undertaking directly providing products or services. Consequently, such gatekeepers have the ability to undermine directly the contestability for those products or services on those core platform services, to the detriment of business users which are not controlled by the gatekeeper.

* This title is an unofficial description.