Principles and obligations of the Digital Markets Act in regulating the economic power of gatekeepers: Positive, negative or trade-off effects?

The European Union’s (EU’s) Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a milestone in the entangled path of regulating the increasing economic power of gatekeepers (e.g. Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft); however, it poses blind spots about its effectiveness with reference to two aspects. The first blind spot consists of not considering that the economic power of gatekeepers comes from multiple sources involving different levels of competition (i.e. within and between platforms). The second blind spot descends from the first one; each source of gatekeepers’ economic power is linked to rents of a different nature: monopolistic, Ricardian or Schumpeterian. However, the DMA does not distinguish the different natures of rents, instead treating all rents extracted by gatekeepers as homogeneous. These intertwined blind spots may provoke paradoxical effects on the main goal pursued by the DMA itself—namely, promoting contestable, fair and innovative digital markets. In contrast with works emphasising the strengths of the DMA in protecting competition in digital markets, the present research unveils these two blind spots affecting the DMA. First, this research analyses the different sources of economic power wielded by gatekeepers and the respective levels of competition to which the DMA refers. Second, it adopts the theoretical lens of the nature of rents to assess the effects of the DMA’s obligations on the effectiveness of its principles: contestability, fairness and innovativeness. Third, it provides implications for policymakers and theoretical insights for investigating the gap between the DMA’s intentions and results.