On 12 October 2022, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The Regulation will enter into force 20 days after publication and will start to apply six months later.
The provisions of the DMA shall apply to a category of core platform services, the so-called “gatekeepers”, offering their services in the European Union (“EU”). A company is presumed to be a gatekeeper if it has (i) an annual turnover of at least EUR 7,5 billion within the EU in the past three years or a fair market value of at least EUR 75 billion, (ii) at least 45 million monthly end users and 10,000 yearly active business users in the EU, and (iii) meets the thresholds in point (ii) in each of the last three financial years. Among these, Big Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft will be affected.
After being designated as gatekeepers by the Commission, they will have six months to comply with their new obligations, such as:
- allow and technically enable end users to easily uninstall any software applications on the operating system of the gatekeeper;
- allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores;
- not treat more favorably services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself than similar services or products of a third party;
- allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features;
- apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application stores;
- provide business users and third parties authorized by a business user, at their request, free of charge, with effective, high-quality, continuous and real-time access to, and use of, aggregated and non-aggregated data, including personal data, that is provided for or generated in the context of the use of the relevant core platform services.
Since DGA was adopted as a regulation, it applies directly into Member States, including Romania.
A press release is not yet available, but the Regulation is available here.
