The DMA’s Case Against Seamlessness
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) does not just regulate competition—it redesigns how digital products work.
The DMA is often framed as a pro-consumer reform—a necessary intervention to “rein in gatekeepers” and restore fairness and contestability in digital markets. That framing obscures a more ambitious—and more troubling—project. At its core, the DMA empowers EU regulators to dictate the architecture of the digital experience itself.
The DMA reflects a deep suspicion of integration. Services that work seamlessly together—search and maps, maps and bookings, messaging and payments—once stood as user-facing innovations. Regulators now treat them as potential forms of “self-preferencing,” and therefore as threats to competition or, at minimum, to “fairness.”
This approach drives a clear regulatory vision: digital services must either interoperate with rivals on mandated terms or remain artificially separate.
Markets do not typically evolve this way. But it is how regulators design systems.