Digital Platforms Regulation: An Innovation-Centric View of the EU’s Digital Markets Act

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is set to become the new standard regulatory framework of the digital economy. It introduces some innovative aspects in ex ante regulation to promote market contestability in a promising direction, like the general objective of counteracting practices that ossify competition and limit contestability of core services in the digital domain. However, the current approach with a scattered list of binding provisions and obligations not properly tailored to the varying types of digital platforms and business models may not deliver on the law’s premises and objectives of a more contestable and fair competitive landscape. ... Specifically, we are concerned that the business model agnostic approach to digital platforms taken in the DMA would miss out on the critical role those digital platforms play for the creation of value. Digital platforms do not just facilitate existing transactions between business users and end-users, they also enable new interactions that would not occur in the absence of the platform. These interactions are linked to the production of novel kinds of data which further contribute to the innovativeness of platform ecosystems.1 Our core thesis rests on the differentiation between creating new interactions through the digital platform that we conceptualise as innovation leading to ‘value creation’, in contrast to facilitating existing interactions or market transactions, which we conceptualise as coordination between business users and end-users leading to ‘value exchange’.