Goran Serdarevic, an Associate Director in our Communications practice, presented last week at the Informa Competition Law Central & Eastern Europe conference, see here for more info.

Goran’s presentation on the current state of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) opened a panel discussion on Competition Law Challenges in Digital Markets. The DMA is a legislative proposal of the European Commission providing ex-ante regulatory tools to promote competition in digital markets. The DMA identifies 8 core platform services (CPS), sets out a mechanism to designate “gatekeepers” for these CPS and provides a list of obligations that gatekeepers need to follow – all in the spirit of promoting contestability and fairness.

In his presentation, Goran reflected on the fact that, with the DMA currently going through the EU Parliament’s legislative process, important changes to the Commission’s proposal are being debated. Andreas Schwab, the leading lawmaker steering the DMA through the EU Parliament, has recently released a report proposing amendments to the draft legislation which points towards increased focus on the largest tech platforms. The amendments aim to achieve this through higher turnover and market value thresholds when designating gatekeepers and the requirement for gatekeepers to provide at least two CPS that meet the minimum number of users (rather than just one, as before). The DMA will be put in front of the EU Parliament this autumn for committee votes and in December 2021 for the plenary vote.

Frontier regularly advises organisations and regulators on competition and policy issues in the digital sector. For more information, please contact Goran Serdarevic on g.serdarevic@frontier-economics.com or call +44 (0) 20 7031 7000.