Digital Markets Act (DMA): A Consumer Protection Perspective

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2022 7(3), 1113-1119 | European Forum Highlight of 31 January 2023 | (Abstract) This Highlight provides an overview of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) from the perspective of consumer protection. The DMA constitutes a part of a long-anticipated digital package of cross-cutting legislation proposed by the European Commission in 2020. The DMA entered into force in 2022 with the objective of ensuring a safe, fair, and contestable digital market. Besides the influx of legislative acts in digital law, the year 2022 was also marked by the 50th anniversary of EU consumer protection. The author takes advantage of this moment to reflect on how the DMA fits in the broader regulatory context of consumer protection and investigate what improvements the DMA brings for consumers. The main problem with the Regulation lies in the ambiguity of its goals, and its approach to the notion of "fairness" in particular. On the one hand, the DMA improves consumer rights through multiple provisions which contribute to increasing interoperability in the market, ensuring easy uninstallation, subscription cancellation, data portability and data transfer, as well as eliminating unfair market practices such as self-preferencing, tying, and tracking users without their proper consent. On the other hand, the DMA treats consumers merely as passive end users in the digital market and it does not engage them fully in the introduced institutional and procedural proceedings. The DMA also misses the opportunity to provide the long-anticipated updated definition of "consumer", which could lead to a recalibration of the EU consumer protection law, and it does not exploit fully the potential of consumer protection.