Dirk Auer on the DMA

CTFN – ICLE Director of Competition Policy Dirk Auer was quoted by CTFN in a story about the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. Read the full piece here.

“The DMA is framed in a structured way where you get gatekeepers and core platform services, and then people who want to plug into that core platform service,” said Dirk Auer, director of competition at the International Center for Law & Economics.

“The difficulty here is that it’s not that people are asking to interoperate with Microsoft as a third party. It’s that a newly acquired Activision Blizzard may no longer be on another platform, and I’m not sure the DMA has much to say about that.

“The DMA is trying to open up access to more core platform services, not make sure that gatekeepers are offering their ecosystem services on another platform,” Auer said.

Auer also said it was unclear whether Xbox would be considered a core platform service, the term used for the eight sectors the DMA will cover. Core platform services include online intermediation services, operating systems and cloud services.