The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) does not just regulate competition—it redesigns how digital products work.
The DMA is often framed as a pro-consumer reform—a necessary intervention to “rein in gatekeepers” and restore fairness and contestability in digital markets. That framing obscures a more ambitious—and more troubling—project. At its core, the DMA empowers EU regulators to dictate the architecture of the digital experience itself.
The DMA reflects a deep suspicion of integration. Services that work seamlessly together—search and maps, maps and bookings, messaging and payments—once stood as user-facing innovations. Regulators now treat them as potential forms of “self-preferencing,” and therefore as threats to competition or, at minimum, to “fairness.”
This approach drives a clear regulatory vision: digital services must either interoperate with rivals on mandated terms or remain artificially separate.
Markets do not typically evolve this way. But it is how regulators design systems.
When Seamlessness Becomes Suspicious
Consider a simple example. A user searches for a restaurant on Google and sees a map, reviews, and an option to book a table. For consumers, that integration is the point. It lowers transaction costs and streamlines the path from discovery to action. Under the DMA, however, the same design risks being labeled self-preferencing if Google favors its own booking tool over rivals.
The implication is fragmentation. Instead of a seamless experience, users must move across multiple services—search in one place, maps in another, bookings somewhere else. A once-integrated workflow becomes a patchwork of disconnected steps.
The DMA extends this logic across the digital ecosystem. Integration between search and maps becomes suspect. Preinstalled apps that function well together appear potentially exclusionary. A platform that builds complementary services around its core offering risks designation as a “gatekeeper” leveraging its position.
The DMA thus encodes a preference for modularity over integration. Not because users demand it—the success of the regulated platforms suggests the opposite—but because regulators fear the competitive and, increasingly, the moral implications of integrated ecosystems.
The Fantasy of Neutrality
This reflects a deeper conceptual shift. Traditional competition law asks whether conduct harms consumers—by reducing output, raising prices, or diminishing innovation. The DMA instead asks whether platforms act with sufficient “neutrality” toward rivals.
But neutrality, in this context, is a mirage.
Digital platforms are not passive conduits. They are products—designed, curated, and continuously optimized. Demanding neutrality requires platforms to stop functioning as products and instead operate as regulated utilities that host competitors on equal terms. It treats Amazon.com like a 19th century railroad.
This logic applies even—especially—when integration improves functionality, lowers costs, or enhances the user experience. Curation—the exercise of judgment, i.e., the absence of perfect neutrality—is the core feature of most digital platforms. Users do not want an alphabetical list of search results on Google, nor do they want to cycle through three separate apps to find, book, and get directions to a restaurant.
EU regulators, however, focus less on user preferences than on reshaping digital markets to reflect their preferred structure and normative vision.
Making Innovation Irrational
The consequences are predictable. By limiting how platforms integrate their own services, the DMA reduces the incentive to build those services in the first place. Why invest in a better mapping tool, payments system, or booking feature if firms cannot fully integrate it into a broader ecosystem?
Digital competition policy increasingly embraces this kind of “leveling down.” Regulators restrict successful firms’ ability to capitalize on their investments and require them to share functionality or data with rivals.
This marks a sharp break from the classical liberal view of competition as a dynamic discovery process—one in which firms experiment, integrate, and innovate under uncertainty. The DMA replaces that process with a set of ex ante constraints designed to shape outcomes in advance.
But competition is not a static condition to engineer. It is a messy, decentralized, and often unpredictable process. EU regulators have struggled to grasp that basic point.
The Illusion of the ‘Correct’ Price
There is also a more practical—and more fundamental—problem. The DMA’s vision of interoperability and neutrality demands constant oversight, technical standard-setting, and ongoing regulatory intervention. This is not a one-off fix; it is a permanent administrative project. In practice, it places the European Commission in the role of deciding which prices and pricing structures are “correct.”
Consider Apple’s App Store fees. If Apple reduces its commission from 30% to 27%, is that sufficient? What if it drops to 17% but expands the base of transactions subject to fees? What if it adopts a different pricing model altogether—lower headline rates paired with higher charges elsewhere? Each approach redistributes value among developers, users, and competitors.
Who decides which outcome is right?
Markets once answered those questions. That view now falls out of favor, dismissed as a relic of the “neoliberal era.” Dirigisme has returned. Regulators in Brussels now assume responsibility for steering digital markets toward their preferred outcomes.
There is just one problem: no neutral answer exists. Pricing structures necessarily involve tradeoffs. Some favor large developers; others benefit smaller firms. Some deliver short-term gains for consumers; others support long-term investment and innovation. The DMA effectively hands regulators the authority to resolve these tradeoffs.
In practice, the primary beneficiaries are often not consumers, but competitors—particularly those that gain access to platform resources or more favorable terms without making comparable investments.
Back to Basics—If We Can
None of this denies that digital markets raise real competition concerns. But micromanaging product design or imposing a one-size-fits-all model for how services must interact is not the answer.
A more coherent approach would return to first principles. Regulators should focus on demonstrable harm, apply effects-based analysis, and preserve the incentives that drive innovation. Intervention in the business models of private, for-profit firms should occur only when actual harm can be shown. That premise may seem unremarkable, but it has become contested.
This discipline matters most in fast-moving sectors, where rigid rules quickly become obsolete, or counterproductive. The emergence of OpenAI and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence may render key aspects of the DMA outdated sooner than even its most fervent critics anticipated.
The User Experience, Regulated
The DMA reflects a distinct vision of the digital economy—one that treats integration as suspect, scale as dangerous, and success as something to constrain through ongoing regulation. In that framework, consumers adapt to regulators’ conception of markets, not the other way around.
That vision carries real costs. By favoring fragmentation over integration and neutrality over functionality, the DMA risks degrading the user experience that made digital services valuable in the first place.
In seeking to discipline how platforms compete, EU regulators increasingly dictate how users interact with technology. The result is a managed, fragmented, and less efficient digital environment—designed not by markets, but by regulators.
That outcome should give policymakers pause.
