The European Commission is about to propose a “revolutionary” overhaul of digital regulation that could hurt the business models of Big Tech, industry experts told CNBC. The Digital Services Act, due to be presented in early December, is expected to overhaul the management of content on platforms like Google and Facebook and is the first of its kind since 2000. Broadly, the EU wants to make tech giants more responsible for the content on their platforms and to ensure that competitors have a fair chance to succeed against the big firms. “It’s revolutionary,” Thomas Vinje, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance, told CNBC Tuesday. The upcoming rules are “likely to require dramatic changes in the business practices and even business models” of Big Tech, he said. Last month, Europe’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager outlined some of the changes that could be included in the new regulation. “The new rules will … require digital services, especially the biggest platforms, to be open about the way they shape the digital world that we see. They’ll have to report on what they’ve done to take down illegal material,” she said. “They’ll have to tell us how they decide what information and products to recommend to us, and which ones to hide, and give us the ability to influence those decisions, instead of simply having them made for us. And they’ll have to tell us who’s paying for the ads that we see, and why we’ve been targeted by a certain ad.” This would be massive for tech firms, which have refused to disclose their algorithms for years. “The strict prohibitions in discussion in the DSA are a tsunami in terms of how platforms do business in Europe,” Nicolas Petit, a competition law professor at the European University Institute said. into companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google over concerns that its market dominance is hindering competition. These probes have been mostly been led by Margrethe Vestager, who took over the competition portfolio in 2014. But real change as a result of these investigations is often elusive, with European officials frustrated by lengthy legal action. For instance, in 2017, the European Commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.81 billion) for promoting its own shopping comparison service rather than allowing similar access to rival companies. Google made some changes in the wake of that case, but a study by Lademann & Associates showed in September that not much has changed. According to the study, less than 1% of traffic through Google Shopping was transferring users to rival shopping websites. More recently, the Commission’s decision to ask Ireland (a member of the EU) to recoup 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes from Apple has been challenged. The EU’s general court decided in July that the Commission had failed to prove that the Irish government had given a tax advantage to Apple. The Commission has appealed that ruling, but it could be difficult for it to meet this burden of proof. “Perhaps the biggest challenge we face with enforcement is making sure that we have the right legal framework and powers to keep digital markets competitive and fair,” Vestager said in late October. Whatever the European Commission proposes next month will have to be signed off by member states and the European Parliament. “It should take several months before we have full legislation, which is an issue in a fast-moving tech market, but more importantly, the rules are only stepping one, with the enforcement of these rules the key issue,” Dexter Thillien, a senior industry analyst at Fitch Solutions, told CNBC via email. He added that Big Tech firms “will use the legislative process, and some have already started, to highlight the negative impact on innovation and the overall economy, to try and make the final rules less strict than the initial proposals.” Apart from some lobbying, however, there is nothing the tech giants can do to stop the new rules in the short-term, Clifford Chance’s Vinje said. “They don’t really have any friends here.” Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.

Quantum computers are not yet creating business value, but CIOs should nonetheless lose no time in getting involved. Supermarket aisles filled with fresh produce are probably not where you would expect to discover some of the first benefits of quantum computing. But Canadian grocery chain Save-On-Foods has become an unlikely pioneer, using quantum technology to improve the management of in-store logistics. In collaboration with quantum computing company D-Wave, Save-On-Foods is using a new type of computing, which is based on the downright weird behavior of matter at the quantum level. And it's already seeing promising results. The company's engineers approached D-Wave with a logistics problem that classical computers were incapable of solving. Within two months, the concept had translated into a hybrid quantum algorithm that was running in one of the supermarket stores, reducing the computing time for some tasks from 25 hours per week down to mere seconds. Save-On-Foods is now looking at expanding the technology to other stores and exploring new ways that quantum could help with other issues. "We now have the capability to run tests and simulations by adjusting variables and see the results, so we can optimize performance, which simply isn't feasible using traditional methods," a Save-On-Foods spokesperson tells ZDNet. "While the results are outstanding, the two most important things from this are that we were able to use quantum computing to attack our most complex problems across the organization, and can do it on an ongoing basis." The remarkable properties of quantum computing boil down to the behavior of qubits -- the quantum equivalent of classical bits that encode information for today's computers in strings of 0s and 1s. But contrary to bits, which can be represented by either 0 or 1, qubits can take on a state that is quantum-specific, in which they exist as 0 and 1 in parallel or superposition. Qubits, therefore, enable quantum algorithms to run various calculations at the same time, and at an exponential scale: the more qubits, the more variables can be explored, and all in parallel. Some of the largest problems, which would take classical computers tens of thousands of years to explore with single-state bits, could be harnessed by qubits in minutes. The challenge lies in building quantum computers that contain enough qubits for useful calculations to be carried out. Qubits are temperamental: they are error-prone, hard to control, and always on the verge of falling out of their quantum state. Typically, scientists have to encase quantum computers in extremely cold, large-scale refrigerators, just to make sure that qubits remain stable. That's impractical, to say the least. This is, in essence, why quantum computing is still in its infancy. Most quantum computers currently work with less than 100 qubits, and tech giants such as IBM and Google are racing to increase that number in order to build a meaningful quantum computer as early as possible. Recently, IBM ambitiously unveiled a roadmap to a million-qubit system and said that it expects a fault-tolerant quantum computer to be an achievable goal during the next ten years. Although it's early days for quantum computing, there is still plenty of interest from businesses willing to experiment with what could prove to be a significant development. "Multiple companies are conducting learning experiments to help quantum computing move from the experimentation phase to commercial use at scale," Ivan Ostojic, partner at consultant McKinsey, tells ZDNet. Certainly, tech companies are racing to be seen as early leaders. IBM's Q Network started running in 2016 to provide developers and industry professionals with access to the company's quantum processors, the latest of which, a 65-qubit device called Hummingbird, was released on the platform last month. Recently, US multinational Honeywell took its first steps on the quantum stage, making the company's trapped-ion quantum computer available to customers over the cloud. Rigetti Computing, which has been operating since 2017, is also providing cloud-based access to a 31-qubit quantum computer. Complete details are posted on OUR FORUM.