Key message The discretion afforded to the European Commission (‘EC’) is of central importance with regard to the implementation and enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’). If viewed as arbitrariness, particularly in view of a normative framework that arguably permits such a perspective, the European Commission’s decisions may potentially jeopardise the rule of law…

A new kid may join the digital tech regulation block. On 2 December, the Australian Treasure proposed a new digital competition regime addressing digital market power. The policy of the Australian legislator and enforcer builds on its long-term digital strategy, triggered in 2017. For more than seven years now, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission…

The Digital Markets Act (DMA)’s provisions started to apply on 2 May 2023. Since then, undertakings have been forced to check whether they met the quantitative thresholds. If that was the case, the DMA compelled them to notify their potential gatekeeper status to the European Commission. The first wave of designation decisions relating to six gatekeepers…

Deployment of systems of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become mainstream and popular with small and large economic operators. One of the most raging developments includes services relying on natural language processing (NLP) taking the form of chatbots. In a previous blog post, I explored the opportunities the Digital Markets Act (DMA) provides the regulator to…

While core competition law enforcement has been going on for a while, the enforcement of the adjacent digital regulation is just beginning. The conference “Tools for Better Enforcement of EU Law in the Digital Space” dealt with such problems and took place on November 7 and 8, 2024 at the European Legal Studies Institute (ELSI)…

As the DMA’s enforcement is in full swing, the complexities of its specific provisions and questions regarding their interpretation are beginning to surface. On 25 March 2024, the European Commission launched formal proceedings to investigate Meta’s ‘pay-or-consent’ model, introduced in November 2023 for Facebook and Instagram, sparking a significant discussion on the interpretation of Article…

To commemorate the Digital Markets Act’s initial designation decisions, in September the European Commission issued its first two decisions opening specification proceedings on Apple’s technical implementation of Article 6(7) DMA (see case DMA.100203 and case DMA.100204). These are the first specification proceedings triggered by the European Commission as stemming from its capacity to do so…

On April 24, 2024, the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) rejected Amazon’s appeal against the decision of the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) of July 2022, designating Amazon as a gatekeeper under national competition law, Section 19a ARC.  The ruling clarifies important aspects of this provision designed to capture large digital companies (see translation of…

As the European Commission prepares for a new mandate under President Ursula von der Leyen later this year, former ECB President Mario Draghi – famous for his “whatever it takes” approach to saving the Euro – has now turned his focus to the future of EU competitiveness in the digital age. His long-awaited report, commissioned…

Approaching the summer vacation, the end of July was deemed extremely eventful for NCA enforcement actions. On 18 July, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA or AGCM) triggered a sanctioning proceeding against Google with respect to the submission to users of a request for consent to the linking of the services they offer. A few days…