ECIPE Webinar: When Innovation Meets Regulation – Assessing the Quality of Regulation of the Digital Markets Act Proposal

According to the OECD’s recent recommendation on principles of good regulatory design, innovation requires “agile and resilient” regulatory approaches. Governments should develop regulatory models that bolster innovative activities, and they should avoid using tools that “historically have not been particularly agile”. The OECD highlights that “innovators often face difficulties in identifying and interpreting applicable rules when innovation is blurring the boundaries of traditional market definitions.”

The EU’s proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA) goes to the heart of innovation. It is a new and experimental type of regulation that targets highly complex technology and services. EU policymakers are confronted with matters that are difficult to place in conventional models of regulation, such as traditional network industries or plain product safety policies. The impacts of the DMA, which has features of a horizontal regulation, can be extraordinarily powerful because its rules would work at the frontier of technological developments and rapidly changing markets. The risk is that poorly designed rules and obligations will have an outsized negative impact on EU Member States, e.g., lack of access to innovative services and technologies by users in smaller and less economically developed European countries.

Join us for an expert discussion of key economic and legal challenges of the current DMA proposal. What is the rationale of the DMA, considering political concerns about fairness and contestability? Does the DMA provide a sufficient level of clarity and legal certainty for innovators and users of digital services? What types of services would fall under the scope of the DMA? Which ones should be carved out? What are the prospects for enforcement and the number of lawsuits initiated by designated gatekeeper companies? Are the proposed rules fit for the purpose of stimulating the technology development and new business models in the EU?