Authored by Alexandre de Streel, CERRE Academic Director and University of Namur.
Two weeks ago, the European Commission adopted its first Digital Markets Act Review Report — an important milestone in the implementation of the DMA. The Commission concluded that the law is a sound piece of legislation and is already producing positive effects. While those positive effects should not be denied, such a favourable assessment was expected, given that the Commission is both the principal author and the main enforcer of the Regulation; in general, when I ask my students to mark their exams, they all pass with honours. The Commission also concluded that the DMA should not be fundamentally revised at this stage. This is a wise choice, considering both the early phase of the Regulation’s implementation and the geopolitical headwinds currently blowing from Mar-a-Lago.
CERRE has been actively engaged with the DMA since its inception in 2020, notably through its annual DMA Forum. The Forum provides a neutral and trusted platform that facilitates dialogue among companies concerned with the DMA, regulators, and policymakers, with the objective of developing concrete recommendations for the effective implementation of the Regulation.
Among our recommendations, we have advised against extending the horizontal interoperability obligations to social networking services, given the limited expected benefits — as multi-homing already exerts significant competitive pressure — and the potentially high implementation costs. The Commission followed our recommendations, noting that “it is too early to extend the interoperability obligations currently imposed on messaging services to online social networking services.”
CERRE also recommended improvements to the DMA’s procedural framework, in particular greater transparency from gatekeepers and increased legal predictability from the Commission. Here, again, the Commission took up our suggestion by considering “possible targeted modifications of the DMA’s procedural framework, potential changes to certain templates used by gatekeepers, and suitable measures to increase transparency in relation to beneficiaries.”
In addition, we called for stronger cooperation among the many national and European regulatory authorities involved in implementing the EU digital rulebook. The Commission similarly recognises the need to “explore, together with the DMA High-Level Group members, ways to further step up cross-regulatory cooperation, which is increasingly necessary.”
Finally, CERRE recommended that future DMA reviews and evaluations should be carried out by an independent body and should be grounded in a robust evidence-based evaluation framework — precisely to avoid the situation of students grading their own exams. Encouragingly, the Commission now intends to develop a “framework to enable a structured assessment of the DMA’s impact going forward.”
CERRE’s mission is to strive for ever better regulation. This is why I was pleased to see that many of CERRE’s recommendations were reflected in the Commission’s Review Report.
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