Policy Brief: Implementing the Digital Markets Act
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) represents one of the most ambitious regulatory efforts undertaken by the European Union to reshape digital competition. Adopted in 2022 and fully applicable since May 2023, the DMA introduces a proactive, ex-ante framework designed to ensure fair and contestable digital markets. By defining a set of obligations for large online platforms known as “gatekeepers” offering core platform services, the regulation seeks to restrain structural imbalances, foster innovation, and protect consumers in an increasingly data-driven economy.
As implementation progresses, the full implications of the DMA are proving both complex and contested. Policymakers, scholars, and industry actors have raised important questions about its effectiveness, proportionality, and long-term impact on innovation, competitiveness, and user trust. The success of the regulation depends not only on how its obligations are enforced but also on whether they achieve their intended goals while minimizing unintended economic or technological consequences.
This brief focuses on three interrelated themes that cut across both the academic debate and policy practice:
1. Competition: assessing whether the DMA’s ex-ante obligations effectively increase market
contestability or instead risk regulatory overreach.
2. Innovation: examining the DMA’s effects on the incentives to innovation, research, development and the scaling of European startups.
3. Data Security, Privacy, and User Experience: exploring how to open digital ecosystems responsibly while protecting cybersecurity, usability, and user trust.
Looking ahead, further improvements and refinements to the Digital Markets Act may not require major amendments to the regulation as a whole. The regulation’s core objectives of fairness and contestability, together with its gatekeeper designation framework, remain well-founded. Its ex-ante obligations have already produced early results.
Drawing on the experience accumulated through specification procedures, enforcement actions, litigation, and the recent Commission review, targeted adjustments are possible within the existing framework.
Introducing greater differentiation and proportionality in the definition and enforcement of interoperability obligations would help balance open access, competitive capacity, legal certainty, and user experience; and thus mitigating risks to innovation without compromising the DMA’s core objectives. These adjustments could be gradually reinforced through complementary economic policy instruments designed to align market actors’ strategies with both the evolving outcomes of the DMA and the European Union’s broader digital sovereignty ambitions.