IGF 2024 Day 0 Event #45 Digital Markets Act | The Impact for Consumers

Last year the European Union enacted the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a new regulation that aims to benefit consumers by promoting competition and innovation in the digital market. The DMA establishes a number of obligations on designated gatekeepers - large digital platforms providing core platform services. These obligations aim to ensure that there is a fairer business market, ultimately resulting in more innovative products and services for consumers. Over the past months, engineers, researchers, product managers and product designers at Google have worked hard to implement a number of changes to our products in the EU. The DMA’s requirements have posed unique engineering challenges that the teams have had to consider in this process. Practically, this has meant understanding how our existing products and services align with the DMA’s requirements and what adaptations we must make, whilst ensuring we provide access to the most innovative products and deliver the best user experience. During our session, Bill Fusz will share his first-hand experience evaluating the DMA, what steps we’ve taken to ensure both a compliant and usable experience, and what it means to end users of some of our popular products. Since the compliance date in March 2024, Bill and a cross-functional team at Google have been measuring the impacts of the DMA to better understand how consumers and the broader ecosystem have reacted to our product changes. After this short presentation, speakers will be asked to provide their own analysis of the impact of the DMA and critically reflect on the learnings shared by Bill. We will then engage in an interactive discussion with in-person and online participants about their experiences and how they see the DMA playing out in practice. From the conversation we hope to develop a few principles for regulators to consider when developing new, or updating existing, regulations that seek to promote innovation and consumer choice.

Using Zoom will allow both onsite and online participants to see and hear each other. We will ask all participants, both in person and remote to be logged in so we can manage the question queue in a neutral manner, but when in doubt will defer to remote participants as sometimes they are more difficult to spot. Our onsite and online moderators will be in constant communication to ensure that we can facilitate questions and comments from both onsite and online participants. We will also consider the unique challenges and opportunities that remote participants face, such as time zone differences, technical limitations, and differences in communication styles. We will urge our speakers to use clear and concise language, avoid technical jargon, and provide context for all information discussed during the session to ensure that both onsite and online participants can follow along and understand the content. Finally, we will explore the use of a polling tool, such as Mentimeter or Poll Everywhere, to ask questions and get feedback from both onsite and online participants in real-time.