The EU Commission proposes the new Digital Markets Act to preemptively tackle ’gatekeepers’, bringing along the question whether DMA will be a complement or a substitute of competition law for the digital sector

The debate on the challenges posed by digital platforms has captured a large share of the attention from the antitrust community in the last years. Large digital platforms have gained significant market power and the economic features of digital markets make them unlikely to retreat. Following two years of intense discussions, triggered by the Crémer Report [1] in early 2019, on whether the EU competition rules were fit to respond to the challenge, the European Commission has put forward a regulatory proposal (the Digital Markets Act, DMA) that would complement the traditional competition tools in digital markets, strengthening control over large digital platforms that ‘serve as an important gateway for business users to reach end users’, the so-called ‘gatekeepers’ The DMA basically