Description

The EU legislature is currently deliberating on a “Digital Markets Act” (DMA), which the EU Commission proposed in December 2020. The objective of the DMA is to protect the contestability of markets and fairness in the business areas affected by large online ecosystems. The DMA is meant to expedite proceedings against the operators those ecosystems (“gatekeepers”), and to submit them to obligations that are easy to supervise. The obligations prescribed by the DMA largely correspond to the behavioral requirements of the existing Articles 101/102 TFEU, which are formulated as prohibitions. However, the DMA lists a number of detailed conduct obligations that gatekeepers active in different business areas must fulfill at the same time, whereas Art. 101 f. TFEU are fleshed out by official intervention in individual cases. Moreover, the DMA neither provides for an examination of the effects nor for a balancing of negative and positive effects of the respective behavioral obligations. At the moment, it is hotly debated whether the DMA targets the right addressees, and whether the conduct obligations and their enforcement will be effective. Meanwhile, the German Federal Cartel Office has launched the first cases under a national provision that may serve as a blueprint for the final version of the DMA. This seminar will examine the challenges facing competition authorities in applying traditional competition law frameworks to online platforms and digital eco-systems, as well as provide an update of the efforts made by competition authorities abroad to address these issues.