I finally had some time to write up some key take-aways/observations from a recent Florence EUI autumn conference panel presentation I gave and the panel on the DMA/DSA in a global perspective, which I co-chaired with Laurent De Muyter at the IBA’s 2023 global conference in Paris.

• The EU is rather the exception than the rule. In many other (including major) jurisdictions across the globe, alleged big tech issues are exclusively or mainly addressed by using (recently updated or in the process of being updated) existing regulatory tools such as antitrust laws, codes of conduct, (in USA) State level content laws, etc. According to some, this amounts to “the USA invents, China produces and the EU regulates tech products and services,” putting the latter at a disadvantage, which remains interesting food for thought.
• Whatever one may think of this, I was fascinated by the number of eyes on the EU from all over the globe. There is a genuine interest in many parts of the world in what is happening in Brussels.
• The well-known, decades long debate about the alleged lack of speed in enforcement in fast-changing digital markets and the alleged obsoleteness of laws once they are in place (as it takes so long to get them through the democratic machinery) is as topical and prominent as ever simply because developments go faster all the time. In my personal view, this is and has always been a reason to potentially focus for at least a number of the alleged issues on the (more?) vigorous and (more?) speedy enforcement of (reinforced) antitrust laws which do not have pre-defined markets or tackled practices, rather than putting in place a spaghetti of new laws.
• A number of prominent members of the antitrust community (lawyers and economists) have recently written fascinating articles about the principle of fairness, ranging from a focus on “just rewards”, “equal opportunities for all”, “ability to compete” and fairness as a moral and legal value “do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you”. The more controversial point then is whether the principle of fairness as enshrined in the DMA needs to be applied in a different,  “innovative” way since economic dynamics have fundamentally changed because of network effects and economies of scale (that allegedly, according to some, allow dominant companies to extract significant surpluses and shield them from competition). However, I also heard economists argue that firms should be able to price freely because they built it and they should be able to do what they want as long as nobody is forced to use services and there is no anti-competitive or other forms of illegal behavior.
• So if economists diverge so much in their views, one can perhaps say that in the EU, the DMA with a number of self-executing or mainly self-executing rules, mainly enshrines what we in the EU collectively think is “fair” – it went through the EU democratic process and reflects the “fairness” will of the people of the EU. 
• In any case, having worked for a long time as an antitrust and trade lawyer, the principle of fairness is very well-known in EU competition law. The word is used in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (which includes key competition provisions) and comes back in case law all the time - think of the reference to unfair in 102 TFEU,  fair share for consumers in 101(3) TFEU, FRAND, etc. The funny thing when analyzing the DMA in detail is that, for example, in paragraph 62 of the pre-amble which deals with fairness considerations, many of the benchmarks that are supposed to be used in the DMA’s application have been well-known for EU antitrust lawyers for a very long time  - for example in a fairness assessment check prices charged for different related or similar users, check different geographic regions, prices applied by a dominant company to itself, etc.

So to end this post with a joke, you better involve antitrust lawyers in your DMA work!