Competition policy and Digital Markets Act. Converging agendas.

Abstract

On December 15^th 2020, the European Commission presented two proposals for the regulation of online platforms. The first concerns the regulation of digital services (hereafter, the "Digital Services Act" or "DSA") while the second constitutes a regulation of digital markets (hereafter, the “Digital Markets Act” or “DMA”).

In order to sum up the content of the proposals presented by the European Commission - whose legal basis is, for both of them, the provision set forth in Article 114 TFEU - the DSA addresses the preparation of a specific mechanism for accountability of the platforms for processing and disseminating digital content "uploaded" by users; while the new regime outlined by the DMA envisages a series qualitative criteria aimed at identifying large online platforms having the function of access control (also known as “gatekeeping”).