Digital Markets Act – questions choisies

A few enterprises of important size, offering core online platform services, play a major role in the digital economy and, as such, exercise significant control over market access, leading to dependencies of their users and potentially to unfair behaviors. To apprehend and help preventing abuses, the European Commission has issued a new Regulation proposal, the “Digital Markets Act ”, applying to a few entities that qualify as “gatekeepers”, pursuant to quantitative and qualitative criteria set in the Regulation, and imposing, as opposed to traditional legal competition instruments, ex ante obligations on them. This article addresses some questions arising from this new legal text regarding its subjective and objective scope of application, targeting in fine a few entreprises based in the United States only (mainly the GAFAM), the necessicity of an ex ante regulation to address abuses of dominant positions in this dynamic and constantly evolving sector, consequences of infringements…