It takes two to tango: Public and private enforcement of the Digital Markets Act

  • Panel
  • Orangerie
  • Friday 22.05 — 10:30 - 11:45

Organising Institution

Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF)

Germany

GFF (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte/Society for Civil Rights) is a German civil liberties NGO that uses strategic litigation to defend fundamental rights — challenging laws on issues like surveillance, discrimination, and freedom of expression before German and European courts.
  • Academic 1
  • Business 2
  • Policy 3
Two years after the DMA ‘compliance day’, the public enforcement machine is on. Regulators have been active with selected enforcement actions and market investigations. Concrete outcomes are becoming visible on digital markets both for businesses and users. However, there is an area which remains nearly unexplored: private litigation. As the DMA provides also for individual rights, its effective application cannot rest exclusively on the public enforcers’ shoulders. Yet, to this day, multiple barriers prevent the useful deployment of both collective redress actions and business to business litigation under the DMA. A robust private enforcement system can contribute to deterrence, damages redistribution, and can help users to regain agency in business relationships. To this aim, public and private enforcement need not to happen in silos but to rather deploy in a harmonious and coordinated exercise of pulls and pushes.

Questions to be answered

  1. How to guarantee complementarity between public and private enforcement of the DMA, to ensure its public interest objectives are fully realised? What lessons from other legal frameworks including competition law?
  2. How does private enforcement before national courts interact with public enforcement at EU level and which instruments and tools are necessary to ensure consistency?
  3. What are the avenues for private enforcement through collective redress? What are the procedural hurdles related to jurisdiction, standing and admissibility?
  4. What does civil society need to litigate the DMA?

Moderator

Jürgen Bering

Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF) - Germany

Jürgen Bering leads GFF's tech justice team. Before joining GFF, Jürgen worked as a competition lawyer and academic.

Speaker

Maria Luisa Stasi

Article 19 - Europe

Head of Law and Policy for digital markets at the fundamental rights NGO ARTICLE 19, with extensive experience in the digital governance debate.

Speaker

Lucas Lasota

Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) - Europe