The European Commission wants Amazon to prove it’s complying with the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The watchdog group has given the tech giant until July 26 to turn over information on the measures it has taken to follow the law, Reuters reported Friday (July 5).
“In particular, Amazon is asked to provide detailed information on its compliance with the provisions concerning transparency of the recommender systems,” the commission said.
Adopted last year, the Digital Services Act (DSA) requires “large online platforms” like Amazon to do more to address illegal or harmful content. (Amazon had sued to prevent being designated such a platform.)
“We are reviewing this request and working closely with the European Commission. Amazon shares the goal of the European Commission to create a safe, predictable and trusted shopping environment,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters.
“We think this is important for all participants in the retail industry, and we invest significantly in protecting our store from bad actors, illegal content, and in creating a trustworthy shopping experience. We have built on this strong foundation for DSA compliance,” the spokesperson added.
A number of Big Tech companies have been making changes this year to remain in compliance with the DSA.
For example, the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn last month said it was phasing out a controversial tool that allowed for the use of sensitive personal data for targeted advertising. The networking platform was announced after receiving pressure from civil society organizations as well as scrutiny from regulators.
Those groups had complained to the European Commission that the tool might allow advertisers to target LinkedIn users based on sensitive personal data such as racial or ethnic origin, political opinions and other personal details via their membership in LinkedIn groups.
And TikTok in April suspended a rewards program on TikTok Lite following a dispute with regulators in Europe, who argued the program could be addictive for children and threatened it with a temporary ban.
“Our children are not guinea pigs for social media,” EU Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton had said before TikTok came to its decision.
“TikTok always seeks to engage constructively with the EU Commission and other regulators,” the TikTok Policy Europe account said on X. “We are therefore voluntarily suspending the rewards functions in TikTok Lite while we address the concerns that they have raised.”
Mobile wallets are well-designed for instant gratification — as that ubiquitous instrument, the mobile phone, makes it easier than ever to pay merchants or to complete a P2P transaction with speed, especially as real-time networks go live across the globe.
But a smooth path between senders and receivers (despite both wielding mobile wallets) across borders is lacking, as there’s no widespread interoperability between networks. Recent research in collaboration between TerraPay and PYMNTS Intelligence indicates that 42% of consumers prefer to send cross-border payments via digital wallets — leaving a staggering greenfield opportunity of 58% of individuals. The opportunity stretches across 5.2 billion mobile wallet users and trillions of transactions, as people travel, conduct cross-border commerce and send remittances.
For TerraPay, which started a decade ago (with the working name “interoperable exchange”), the initial starting point in simplifying global money movement took its cue from the telecoms, and the fact that SMS messages could cross competing carriers’ networks — one of the earliest forms of interoperability.
But as Ani Sane, co-founder and chief business officer at TerraPay, told Karen Webster in a recent interview, moving money is about more than just the transaction: “It’s about compliance, regulations and reconciliation, and settlements and scheme rules.” Building a network to handle those complexities is no easy task, given the fact that as Sane said, digital wallets operate in silos, on the regulatory and technological sides of the equation, as they’re designed to work in a particular country.
TerraPay has been building a network to that allows banks to leverage their existing Swift relationships and send payments to be integrated into TerraPay’s platform to enable payments between digital wallets. The banks, he said, do not have to conduct any technical heavy lifting for that connectivity or to bring digital wallet options to end customers. Additionally, TerraPay connects to merchants, enabling them to accept digital wallet payments — and thus the thousands of wallets operating across the globe mimic the almost universal acceptance of physical cards at physical and digital points of sale.
“On our platform,” in 2024, “more than 50% of our transactions globally were delivered to mobile wallets … they were small-value ticket sizes,” he said, “but sending money to a wallet instantly is a great opportunity for banks to serve those small-value customers and businesses.”
There’s already broad familiarity with global fund flows, as the data shows 70% of consumers use cross-border transactions to pay and receive remittances and 77% of businesses generally engage in business-to-business cross-border transactions with suppliers.
That global reach, Sane said, will broaden financial inclusion. As he told Webster, “When you look at the underbanked and underserved segments” of the world, “and you look at mobile wallets [held] by that segment, it matches up almost 100%.”
COVID, especially, has made us all global citizens, and as such, we want to be able to transact globally. Sane recounted how TerraPay’s initial tests with merchants at duty-free shops at the Dubai airport revealed that offering M-Pesa, Airtel or other payment options through the interoperability network made African travelers landing there enthusiastic consumers.
“The point is to build that trust between merchants,” he said, “without having to think about which [payment] schemes have done the best. It’s a long journey … and we’ll need more efforts from the merchant side of this.”
Looking ahead, Sane said, “What we are trying to do is create the infrastructure to create the ‘rule books’ of reconciliation and settlement mechanisms … for both the wallets and the merchants and to do cross-border what they do domestically. … It’s an amazing tool to be able to use the mobile wallets as financial instruments.”
