While built on a number of rules that respond to similar behaviours that have been sanctioned in the past as abuses of dominant position, the DMA is an entirely new legal instrument. It is to be expected that enforcers will look at competition case law and literature as a reference point, but the DMA’s objectives are different, and complementary, to those of EU competition law. Enforcers should therefore be cautious not to heavily borrow competition case law and concepts in the implementation of the DMA. Rather, they should work to interpret and apply the DMA in a way that guarantees their full potential in order to achieve the regulation’s ambitious objectives of contestability and fairness in digital markets.

Scholars have a key role to play in this scenario. They can assess the deeper layers and enforcement framework of the new rules, interpret their content, and assess the rules’ potential in their own right and in relation to other fields of EU law to support the enforcers in making informed decisions.