News & positions

The political agreement between the European Parliament and Council on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) paves the way for a fairer online trading environment

Brussels, 31 March 2022 – AIM, the European Brands Association, welcomes the landmark political agreement reached last week by the European Parliament and Council on the proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will help curb gatekeeper platforms’ unfair trading practices online against consumers and businesses.  

“We look forward to the formal adoption of the DMA, which will enable fair competition in the online environment, beneficial for consumers and also businesses who serve those consumers through this ever-growing channel”, remarked Michelle Gibbons, Director General of AIM.

“We applaud the Commission for their leadership in driving a Fairness for All approach in the past few years, both online and offline with the Unfair Trading Practices Directive, to deal with abusive or unfair trading practices – we will need to ensure coherence of all this legislation in the years to come in the retail ecosystem”.

AIM welcomes in particular:

• the ban on self-preferencing of gatekeepers’ own products or services;
• the obligation on gatekeepers to provide business users with access to (sales) data generated by their activities on the gatekeepers’ platforms;
• the prohibition on gatekeepers to use data obtained from their business users to develop products or services competing with theirs;
• the clarification that business users can offer products and services on their own sales/distribution channels at different prices and conditions than those offered for sale on the gatekeepers’ platforms;
• the addition of the existence of a ‘conglomerate corporate structure’ among the qualitative criteria that the Commission may consider to designate as gatekeeper a platform which do not meet the quantitative criteria to be automatically designed as such.