On 15 December the European Commission (EC) published its draft Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will introduce broad reforms to the application of EU competition law to ‘gatekeepers’ in the digital sector. We have produced an alert that looks in more detail at how the DMA will work, and its likely impact.
Summary
The proposals set out in-principle criteria for companies that offer ‘core platform services’, which, if met, raise the rebuttable presumption that the company is a gatekeeper. Companies that meet the criteria will either need to prove to the EC that they are not gatekeepers or will need to abide by specific ‘dos and don’ts’, with significant fines for non-compliance, and the possibility of repeat offenders being required to divest parts of their business.
The DMA would also allow the EC to conduct market investigations to enable it to keep the gatekeeper criteria and ‘dos and don’ts’ updated dynamically and to design remedies to tackle systematic infringements of the DMA rules.
Click here for our alert on the DMA.
The Digital Services Act
The DMA was published alongside a draft Digital Services Act (DSA), which has a wider scope (applying to all digital services that connect consumers to goods, services, or content) and will, if adopted, introduce new obligations relating to such issues as illegal content, transparency and traceability of business users. We have produced an initial overview that summarises the key elements of both the DMA and the DSA:
The Digital Services Act package is here!
