ARTICLE 19, in partnership with the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance, the Hertie School Centre for Digital Governance, and the University of Trento, is pleased to be providing a forum for dialogue between academics and regulators regarding the enforcement of the Digital Market Act (DMA) in the European Union at our inaugural joint symposium in Brussels on 22 and 23 November.
European Commission officials and national competition authorities have started to enforce the DMA, the EU’s new regulation to make markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable. The DMA is built on a number of rules that respond to behaviours previously sanctioned as abuses of dominant position, but the DMA is an entirely new legal instrument and needs to be enforced as such.
It is to be expected that enforcers will look to competition case law and literature as a reference point, but the DMA’s objectives are different, and complementary, to those of EU competition law. Enforcers should therefore be cautious not to heavily borrow competition case law and concepts in the implementation of these new rules. Rather, they should work to interpret and apply the DMA in a way that guarantees its full potential in order to achieve the regulation’s ambitious objectives of opening markets and making them fairer for competitors and users alike.
Scholars have a key role to play, and enforcers’ ongoing collaboration with academics is paramount. Independent research can help to assess the deeper layers of, and anticipate challenges in, enforcing the new rules, interpret their content, and situate the DMA in a broader context, making it possible to assess the rules’ potential in their own right and in relation to other fields of EU law.
Over the two days, academics and regulators will convene in five panels to consider big-picture assessments of the DMA before discussing specific gatekeeper obligations and how to implement them. They will also assess the role of third-party participation and other expected challenges in enforcing the DMA.