EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

to internet infrastructure services and online platforms. The rules specified in the DSA primarily concern online intermediaries and platforms. For example, online marketplaces, social networks, content-sharing platforms, app stores, and online travel and accommodation platforms. In mid-December last year, the European Parliament (EP) voted on the text of the DMA before entering the so-called “trialogue”, where the final text will be resolved. Among others, the EP’s amendments: • Ensure consumer choice of social network and instant messaging services by obliging big platforms to allow competitors’ services to work seamlessly with their own, just as e-mail and telephone services work perfectly regardless of the operator; • Explicitly prohibit gatekeepers from circumventing their obligations through the use of ‘dark patterns’ (behavioural techniques) and interface design to distort consumers’ choices; • Allow the consumer’s voice to be heard in procedures for the implementation and enforcement of the DMA; • Be enforceable in Member States’ courts, including through consumer organisations’ collective actions; • Extend the scope of DMA rules to cover digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri; and • Ensure the European Commission is adequately resourced to carry out its enforcement functions under the DMA, as regards both the number of staff and the types of expertise required (BEUC [online], 2020). 4. Conclusion The digital economy has become a central driver to future prosperity. It has stimulated a shift in market dynamics, paving the way for the emergence of platforms, networks, and the proliferation of multi-sided markets, connecting companies with millions of consumers across Europe (BEUC, 2019, p.25). In addition to these positives, the rapid development also brings with new challenges to competition policy and to a “new” consumer – a digital (end) consumer. As far as competition policy is concerned, many questions have arisen especially over the concept of consumer welfare. DG Comp and national competition authorities at least rhetorically still apply consumer welfare wording, used for example by the former Director General Johannes Laitenberger: “We must take an empirically driven view of consumer welfare and recognise that some consumer harm is not readily visible in price and output effects” (Laitenberger, 2018, p. 1).

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