Tech Antitrust & Digital Markets.

The DMA's core ex-ante obligations formally apply only to platforms formally designated as "gatekeepers" by the European Commission, which in practice means the very largest core platform services measured by users, revenue and market capitalisation thresholds. But the DMA's reach extends well beyond those designated companies: if your platform is a business user of a gatekeeper's service, you gain rights under the DMA even though you were never designated yourself. And platforms that are not gatekeepers today but are growing quickly in a category with an existing gatekeeper should still track the thresholds, because designation can arrive faster than a compliance programme can be built from scratch. We help clients work out which side of the DMA they actually sit on, and what follows from that.

More than most business users realise. The DMA gives you the right to access data your own business activity generates on the gatekeeper's platform, the right not to be disadvantaged by the gatekeeper preferencing its own competing products or services in rankings and search results, the right to communicate and conclude contracts with your own customers outside the gatekeeper's platform, and the right to fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory access terms rather than terms set unilaterally with no real ability to negotiate. These rights are enforceable — through complaints to the European Commission and, increasingly, through national courts — and gatekeepers that ignore them face real exposure. We advise business users on when a complaint is worth pursuing and how to build the evidentiary record it needs.

Most investigations start one of three ways: a complaint from a competitor or business user alleging anti-competitive conduct, a sector inquiry the regulator opens on its own initiative into a category showing signs of concentrated market power, or a referral connected to a merger review that surfaces broader concerns. Once opened, the process typically begins with an informal request for information, which can escalate to formal requests with binding deadlines, and in more serious cases to unannounced on-site inspections — dawn raids — at the company's premises. How a company responds to the very first request often shapes the regulator's view of the whole matter, which is why early, well-informed positioning matters far more than most companies expect going in.

Yes, and this is one of the fastest-developing areas of enforcement practice. Traditional antitrust law required proof of an agreement or concerted practice between competitors, but regulators are now examining whether independent pricing algorithms that each monitor competitors' prices and adjust automatically can produce collusive-looking outcomes without any human agreement ever taking place — sometimes called tacit algorithmic collusion. The legal theories here are genuinely still being worked out across EU and national enforcement practice, which means both the risk and the room to argue a defensible position are real. Reviewing pricing systems before a regulator asks about them is far cheaper than reconstructing their logic under investigation pressure.

Take the deadline seriously and get legal advice before you respond, not after. What a company volunteers in its first response often frames the entire investigation, and information given without legal review can narrow a company's position in ways that are difficult to undo later. Do not ignore or informally negotiate the deadline without counsel; do not assume an information request is routine just because it is not (yet) a formal decision. Having someone review the request, scope what genuinely must be disclosed, and manage the response process — informed by what actually happens on the regulator's side of that exchange — changes the trajectory of the matter far more than most companies expect at the first-request stage.