After years of debate and negotiations, European Lawmakers have agreed upon what will most likely be the final iteration of the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”), following the March 24 final round of “trilogue” talks.
For the uninitiated, the DMA is one in a string of legislative proposals around the globe intended to “rein in” tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple through mandated interoperability requirements and other regulatory tools, such as bans on self-preferencing. Other important bills from across the pond include the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the ACCESS Act, and the Open App Markets Act.
In many ways, the final version of the DMA represents the worst possible outcome, given the items that were still up for debate. The Commission caved to some of the Parliament’s more excessive demands—such as sweeping interoperability provisions that would extend not only to “ancillary” services, such as payments, but also to messaging services’ basic functionalities. Other important developments include the addition of voice assistants and web browsers to the list of Core Platform Services (“CPS”), and symbolically higher “designation” thresholds that further ensure the act will apply overwhelmingly to just U.S. companies. On a brighter note, lawmakers agreed that companies could rebut their designation as “gatekeepers,” though it remains to be seen how feasible that will be in practice.
We offer here an overview of the key provisions included in the final version of the DMA and a reminder of the shaky foundations it rests on.
Interoperability
Among the most important of the DMA’s new rules concerns mandatory interoperability among online platforms. In a nutshell, digital platforms that are designated as “gatekeepers” will be forced to make their services “interoperable” (i.e., compatible) with those of rivals. It is argued that this will make online markets more contestable and thus boost consumer choice. But as ICLE scholars have been explaining for some time, this is unlikely to be the case (here, here, and here). Interoperability is not the panacea EU legislators claim it to be. As former ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman has written, there are many things that could be interoperable, but aren’t. The reason is that interoperability comes with costs as well as benefits. For instance, it may be worth letting different earbuds have different designs because, while it means we sacrifice easy interoperability, we gain the ability for better designs to be brought to the market and for consumers to be able to choose among them. Economists Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro concur:
Although compatibility has obvious benefits, obtaining and maintaining compatibility often involves a sacrifice in terms of product variety or restraints on innovation.
There are other potential downsides to interoperability. For instance, a given set of interoperable standards might be too costly to implement and/or maintain; it might preclude certain pricing models that increase output; or it might compromise some element of a product or service that offers benefits specifically because it is not interoperable (such as, e.g., security features). Consumers may also genuinely prefer closed (i.e., non-interoperable) platforms. Indeed: “open” and “closed” are not synonyms for “good” and “bad.” Instead, as Boston University’s Andrei Hagiu has shown, there are fundamental welfare tradeoffs at play that belie simplistic characterizations of one being inherently superior to the other.
Further, as Sam Bowman observed, narrowing choice through a more curated experience can also be valuable for users, as it frees them from having to research every possible option every time they buy or use some product (if you’re unconvinced, try turning off your spam filter for a couple of days). Instead, the relevant choice consumers exercise might be in choosing among brands. In sum, where interoperability is a desirable feature, consumer preferences will tend to push for more of it. However, it is fundamentally misguided to treat mandatory interoperability as a cure-all elixir or a “super tool” of “digital platform governance.” In a free-market economy, it is not—or, it should not—be up to courts and legislators to substitute for businesses’ product-design decisions and consumers’ revealed preferences with their own, based on diffuse notions of “fairness.” After all, if we could entrust such decisions to regulators, we wouldn’t need markets or competition in the first place.
Of course, it was always clear that the DMA would contemplate some degree of mandatory interoperability – indeed, this was arguably the new law’s biggest selling point. What was up in the air until now was the scope of such obligations. The Commission had initially pushed for a comparatively restrained approach, requiring interoperability “only” in ancillary services, such as payment systems (“vertical interoperability”). By contrast, the European Parliament called for more expansive requirements that would also encompass social-media platforms and other messaging services (“horizontal interoperability”).
The problem with such far-reaching interoperability requirements is that they are fundamentally out of pace with current privacy and security capabilities. As ICLE Senior Scholar Mikolaj Barczentewicz has repeatedly argued, the Parliament’s insistence on going significantly beyond the original DMA’s proposal and mandating interoperability of messaging services is overly broad and irresponsible. Indeed, as Mikolaj notes, the “likely result is less security and privacy, more expenses, and less innovation.”The DMA’s defensers would retort that the law allows gatekeepers to do what is “strictly necessary” (Council) or “indispensable” (Parliament) to protect safety and privacy (it is not yet clear which wording the final version has adopted). Either way, however, the standard may be too high and companies may very well offer lower security to avoid liability for adopting measures that would be judged by the Commission and the courts as going beyond what is “strictly necessary” or “indispensable.” These safeguards will inevitably be all the more indeterminate (and thus ineffectual) if weighed against other vague concepts at the heart of the DMA, such as “fairness.”
Gatekeeper Thresholds and the Designation Process
Another important issue in the DMA’s construction concerns the designation of what the law deems “gatekeepers.” Indeed, the DMA will only apply to such market gatekeepers—so-designated because they meet certain requirements and thresholds. Unfortunately, the factors that the European Commission will consider in conducting this designation process—revenues, market capitalization, and user base—are poor proxies for firms’ actual competitive position. This is not surprising, however, as the procedure is mainly designed to ensure certain high-profile (and overwhelmingly American) platforms are caught by the DMA.
From this perspective, the last-minute increase in revenue and market-capitalization thresholds—from 6.5 billion euros to 7.5 billion euros, and from 65 billion euros to 75 billion euros, respectively—won’t change the scope of the companies covered by the DMA very much. But it will serve to confirm what we already suspected: that the DMA’s thresholds are mostly tailored to catch certain U.S. companies, deliberately leaving out EU and possibly Chinese competitors (see here and here). Indeed, what would have made a difference here would have been lowering the thresholds, but this was never really on the table. Ultimately, tilting the European Union’s playing field against its top trading partner, in terms of exports and trade balance, is economically, politically, and strategically unwise.
As a consolation of sorts, it seems that the Commission managed to squeeze in a rebuttal mechanism for designated gatekeepers. Imposing far-reaching obligations on companies with no (or very limited) recourse to escape the onerous requirements of the DMA would be contrary to the basic principles of procedural fairness. Still, it remains to be seen how this mechanism will be articulated and whether it will actually be viable in practice.
Double (and Triple?) Jeopardy
Two recent judgments from the European Court of Justice (ECJ)—Nordzucker and bpost—are likely to underscore the unintended effects of cumulative application of both the DMA and EU and/or national competition laws. The bpost decision is particularly relevant, because it lays down the conditions under which cases that evaluate the same persons and the same facts in two separate fields of law (sectoral regulation and competition law) do not violate the principle of ne bis in idem, also known as “double jeopardy.” As paragraph 51 of the judgment establishes:
- There must be precise rules to determine which acts or omissions are liable to be subject to duplicate proceedings;
- The two sets of proceedings must have been conducted in a sufficiently coordinated manner and within a similar timeframe; and
- The overall penalties must match the seriousness of the offense.
It is doubtful whether the DMA fulfills these conditions. This is especially unfortunate considering the overlapping rules, features, and goals among the DMA and national-level competition laws, which are bound to lead to parallel procedures. In a word: expect double and triple jeopardy to be hotly litigated in the aftermath of the DMA.
Of course, other relevant questions have been settled which, for reasons of scope, we will have to leave for another time. These include the level of fines (up to 10% worldwide revenue, or 20% in the case of repeat offenses); the definition and consequences of systemic noncompliance (it seems that the Parliament’s draconian push for a general ban on acquisitions in case of systemic noncompliance has been dropped); and the addition of more core platform services (web browsers and voice assistants).
The DMA’s Dubious Underlying Assumptions
The fuss and exhilaration surrounding the impending adoption of the EU’s most ambitious competition-related proposal in decades should not obscure some of the more dubious assumptions which underpin it, such as that:
- It is still unclear that intervention in digital markets is necessary, let alone urgent.
- Even if it were clear, there is scant evidence to suggest that tried and tested ex post instruments, such as those envisioned in EU competition law, are not up to the task.
- Even if the prior two points had been established beyond any reasonable doubt (which they haven’t), it is still far from clear that DMA-style ex ante regulation is the right tool to address potential harms to competition and to consumers that arise in digital markets.
It is unclear that intervention is necessary
Despite a mounting moral panic around and zealous political crusading against Big Tech (an epithet meant to conjure antipathy and distrust), it is still unclear that intervention in digital markets is necessary. Much of the behavior the DMA assumes to be anti-competitive has plausible pro-competitive justifications. Self-preferencing, for instance, is a normal part of how platforms operate, both to improve the value of their core products and to earn returns to reinvest in their development. As ICLE’s Dirk Auer points out, since platforms’ incentives are to maximize the value of their entire product ecosystem, those that preference their own products frequently end up increasing the total market’s value by growing the share of users of a particular product (the example of Facebook’s integration of Instagram is a case in point). Thus, while self-preferencing may, in some cases, be harmful, a blanket presumption of harm is thoroughly unwarranted.
Similarly, the argument that switching costs and data-related increasing returns to scale (in fact, data generally entails diminishing returns) have led to consumer lock-in and thereby raised entry barriers has also been exaggerated to epic proportions (pun intended). As we have discussed previously, there are plenty of counterexamples where firms have easily overcome seemingly “insurmountable” barriers to entry, switching costs, and network effects to disrupt incumbents.
To pick a recent case: how many of us had heard of Zoom before the pandemic? Where was TikTok three years ago? (see here for a multitude of other classic examples, including Yahoo and Myspace).
Can you really say, with a straight face, that switching costs between messaging apps are prohibitive? I’m not even that active and I use at least six such apps on a daily basis: Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter, Viber, Telegram, and Slack (it took me all of three minutes to download and start using Slack—my newest addition). In fact, chances are that, like me, you have always multihomed nonchalantly and had never even considered that switching costs were impossibly high (or that they were a thing) until the idea that you were “locked-in” by Big Tech was drilled into your head by politicians and other busybodies looking for trophies to adorn their walls.
What about the “unprecedented,” quasi-fascistic levels of economic concentration? First, measures of market concentration are sometimes anchored in flawed methodology and market definitions (see, e.g., Epic’s insistence that Apple is a monopolist in the market for operating systems, conveniently ignoring that competition occurs at the smartphone level, where Apple has a worldwide market share of 15%—see pages 45-46 here). But even if such measurements were accurate, high levels of concentration don’t necessarily mean that firms do not face strong competition. In fact, as Nicolas Petit has shown, tech companies compete vigorously against each other across markets.
But perhaps the DMA’s raison d’etre rests less on market failure, but rather on a legal or enforcement failure? This, too, is misguided.
EU competition law is already up to the task
As Giuseppe Colangelo has argued persuasively (here and here), it is not at all clear that ex post competition regulation is insufficient to tackle anti-competitive behavior in the digital sector:
Ongoing antitrust investigations demonstrate that standard competition law still provides a flexible framework to scrutinize several practices described as new and peculiar to app stores.
The recent Google Shopping decision, in which the Commission found that Google had abused its dominant position by preferencing its own online-shopping service in Google Search results, is a case in point (the decision was confirmed by the General Court and is now pending review before the European Court of Justice). The “self-preferencing” category has since been applied by other EU competition authorities. The Italian competition authority, for instance, fined Amazon 1 billion euros for preferencing its own distribution service, Fulfilled by Amazon, on the Amazon marketplace (i.e., Amazon.it). Thus, Article 102, which includes prohibitions on “applying dissimilar conditions to similar transactions,” appears sufficiently flexible to cover self-preferencing, as well as other potentially anti-competitive offenses relevant to digital markets (e.g., essential facilities).
For better or for worse, EU competition law has historically been sufficiently pliable to serve a range of goals and values. It has also allowed for experimentation and incorporated novel theories of harm and economic insights. Here, the advantage of competition law is that it allows for a more refined, individualized approach that can avoid some of the pitfalls of applying a one-size fits all model across all digital platforms. Those pitfalls include: harming consumers, jeopardizing the business models of some of the most successful and pro-consumer companies in existence, and ignoring the differences among platforms, such as between Google and Apple’s app stores. I turn to these issues next.
Ex ante regulation probably isn’t the right tool
Even if it were clear that intervention is necessary and that existing competition law was insufficient, it is not clear that the DMA is the right regulatory tool to address any potential harms to competition and consumers that may arise in the digital markets. Here, legislators need to be wary of unintended consequences, trade-offs, and regulatory fallibility. For one, It is possible that the DMA will essentially consolidate the power of tech platforms, turning them into de facto public utilities. This will not foster competition, but rather will make smaller competitors systematically dependent on so-called gatekeepers. Indeed, why become the next Google if you can just free ride off of the current Google? Why download an emerging messaging app if you can already interact with its users through your current one? In a way, then, the DMA may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Moreover, turning closed or semi-closed platforms such as the iOS into open platforms more akin to Android blurs the distinctions among products and dampens interbrand competition. It is a supreme paradox that interoperability and sideloading requirements purportedly give users more choice by taking away the option of choosing a “walled garden” model. As discussed above, overriding the revealed preferences of millions of users is neither pro-competitive nor pro-consumer (but it probably favors some competitors at the expense of those two things).
Nor are many of the other obligations contemplated in the DMA necessarily beneficial to consumers. Do users really not want to have default apps come preloaded on their devices and instead have to download and install them manually? Ditto for operating systems. What is the point of an operating system if it doesn’t come with certain functionalities, such as a web browser? What else should we unbundle—keyboard on iOS? Flashlight? Do consumers really want to choose from dozens of app stores when turning on their new phone for the first time? Do they really want to have their devices cluttered with pointless split-screens? Do users really want to find all their contacts (and be found by all their contacts) across all messaging services? (I switched to Viber because I emphatically didn’t.) Do they really want to have their privacy and security compromised because of interoperability requirements?Then there is the question of regulatory fallibility. As Alden Abott has written on the DMA and other ex ante regulatory proposals aimed at “reining in” tech companies:
Sorely missing from these regulatory proposals is any sense of the fallibility of regulation. Indeed, proponents of new regulatory proposals seem to implicitly assume that government regulation of platforms will enhance welfare, ignoring real-life regulatory costs and regulatory failures (see here, for example).
This brings us back to the second point: without evidence that antitrust law is “not up to the task,” far-reaching and untested regulatory initiatives with potentially high error costs are put forth as superior to long-established, consumer-based antitrust enforcement. Yes, antitrust may have downsides (e.g., relative indeterminacy and slowness), but these pale in comparison to the DMA’s (e.g., large error costs resulting from high information requirements, rent-seeking, agency capture).
Conclusion
The DMA is an ambitious piece of regulation purportedly aimed at ensuring “fair and open digital markets.” This implies that markets are not fair and open; or that they risk becoming unfair and closed absent far-reaching regulatory intervention at EU level. However, it is unclear to what extent such assumptions are borne out by the reality of markets. Are digital markets really closed? Are they really unfair? If so, is it really certain that regulation is necessary? Has antitrust truly proven insufficient? It also implies that DMA-style ex ante regulation is necessary to tackle it, and that the costs won’t outweigh the benefits. These are heroic assumptions that have never truly been seriously put to the test.
Considering such brittle empirical foundations, the DMA was always going to be a contentious piece of legislation. However, there was always the hope that EU legislators would show restraint in the face of little empirical evidence and high error costs. Today, these hopes have been dashed. With the adoption of the DMA, the Commission, Council, and the Parliament have arguably taken a bad piece of legislation and made it worse. The interoperability requirements in messaging services, which are bound to be a bane for user privacy and security, are a case in point.
After years trying to anticipate the whims of EU legislators, we finally know where we’re going, but it’s still not entirely sure why we’re going there.