The DMA will start to apply on March 2024. Starting on the 2nd of May, the gatekeepers have a maximum of two months to notify their gatekeeper status to the European Commission (EC). The European Commission (EC) has acquired the compromise to make the process of the DMA’s future implementation, monitoring and oversight of compliance as…

Last 9 December, the European Commission issued its first draft implementing regulation for the DMA setting out the practical details surrounding the procedures around the gatekeeper’s designation (see the overview of the draft here). The feedback period surrounding the draft finished on 9 January 2023. On 14 April, the European Commission made public the first…

The long-awaited European Court of Justice’s judgment in Towercast confirmed that national competition authorities (and national courts) can apply abuse of dominance rules to mergers that did not trigger EU and national merger control thresholds and were not referred to the European Commission under Article 22 of the EU Merger Regulation. However, uncertainties still remain….

On 13 March 2023, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate of The Netherlands published the first draft of its implementing regulation (the ‘Draft Bill’) subject to public consultation until the 10th of April, to attribute its national competition authority (ACM) with the power to monitor compliance with the DMA in its national territory. The…

The Digital Services Act: a primer Following its adoption by the Council on October 4, the final version of the Digital Services Act (DSA) has been approved and will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) in the forthcoming weeks. The DSA operates a major step in the ambitious project of…

Introduction On 20 May 2020 the Dutch competition authority (“ACM”) conditionally cleared a new joint venture between transport company Pon Netherlands B.V. (“Pon”) and Dutch rail operator NS Groep N.V. (“NS”) creating a Mobility as a Service (“MaaS”) platform. The case was referred to the ACM by the European Commission (“Commission”) under Article 9 of…

On 2 June 2020, the European Commission published its roadmap on the possible introduction of a ‘new competition tool’ that would allow it to initiate market investigations into perceived structural competition problems, with the ability to impose market-wide remedies on companies. The proposal has obvious parallels to the market investigation tools already in place in…