Digital Markets Act (DMA)

Full name: Regulation  (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Digital Markets Act)

Type: Regulation

Objective and key elements:

• Ensuring fair and contestable digital markets in the EU — a level playing field
• Preventing “gatekeepers” from
• Do’s and don’t for gatekeepers to inter alia:
  • Preventing them imposing unfair conditions on businesses and end users and ensuring the openness of important digital services;
  • Allowing businesses to have access to more information on how their products or services are performing on third-party platforms;
  • Preventing unfair ranking of gatekeepers’ own services and products compared to those offered by other businesses on the same platform: and
  • Preventing consumer lock-in

Relevant to: “Gatekeepers” providing core platform services and anyone using or competing with such services

Core platform services are defined as (a) online intermediation services, (b) online search engines, (c) online social networking services, (d) video-sharing platform services, (e) number-independent interpersonal communications services, (f) operating systems, (g) web browsers, (h) virtual assistants, (i) cloud computing services, (j) online advertising services, including any advertising networks, advertising exchanges, and any other advertising intermediation services, provided by an undertaking that provides any of the core platform services listed in points (a) to (i)
Criteria for qualifying as a gatekeeper set out in Article 3, but to summarise, focus is on “big tech”

Status: In force. However, parts still under implementation such as:

• obligation to disclose gatekeeper status to the Commission (for those platforms meeting the criteria) by 2 May 2023
• core obligations for gatekeepers to apply 6 months from designation (expected Q4 2023 or Q1 2024)

(Last updated 12 February 2023)