The Commission’s vision for Europe’s digital future: proposals for the Data Governance Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act—a critical primer

Abstract

The author discusses the EU Commission’s triad of proposals in the Digital Services Package of Winter 2020, i.e. the proposed Data Governance Act (DGA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA). These bills represent the hitherto most ambitious and broad regulatory project in the field of data and digital services regulation worldwide. While the DGA and DSA are also critically discussed, specific emphasis is paid to the DMA Proposal. This Proposal represents a hybrid approach to specific regulation of gatekeeper platforms, which in substance makes perfect sense. The main desiderata concern the co-ordination with European and national competition law and the introduction of further and more differentiated provisions in the area of enforcement. In fact, this latter aspect is partly linked to the former since e.g. contextual integration in competition law would allow to make use of the European Competition Network under EU Regulation 1/2003 to enforce the DMA Proposal’s provisions and in particular to coordinate EU and national enforcement, based on both, the DMA Proposal and EU or national competition law. Apart from that, a European legal framework for private remedies and enforcement in regard to the obligations laid down in the Proposal seems of paramount importance, since otherwise there is a danger of considerable disharmonization and inefficiency in regard to diverse private remedies according to the different Member States’ respective national contract, tort and unfair competition laws.