What is the Digital Markets Act (DMA)?
The DMA is a new set of rules that is aiming to protect the European market from dominant tech platform, the gatekeepers. Together with the Digital Services Act (DSA), the DMA is one of the centerpieces of the European digital strategy. By controlling the gatekeepers, the DMA is aiming to foster innovation, growth, fair competition, and facilitate the scaling up of smaller platforms, SMEs and start-ups. Furthermore, the DMA aims to rebalance the market powers to protect the European users, companies, and public authorities according to European values, which place citizens at the center.
Who are the gatekeepers?
The DMA defines a set of clear criteria for so-called gatekeepers. The criteria were purposefully set high to not put any burden on the smaller platforms but rather target the largest tech giants that dominate the economy across various markets.
In particular, the DMA classifies companies with a market capitalization of at least 75 billion euros or a turnover in the European economic area of at least 7.5 billion euros as a gatekeeper. The platforms concerned further must have 45 million monthly users in the EU and 10,000 active business users per year. Given the high requirements, mostly the largest tech giants, such as Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Apple, or the travel platform Booking.com, among others, fall under the scrutiny of the DMA.
To learn more about the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the accompanying Digital Service Act (DSA) check out our blog post about how the Digital Markets Act (DMA) will shape the future of digital identity in Europe.
