The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a new regulation of the European Union, approved in 2022, which aims to constrain the market share and power of dominant Internet gatekeepers in products like browsers, instant messaging apps, social media, cloud services and more, imposing requirements such as mandatory interoperability and prohibitions on practices like self-preferencing and bundling of apps and services. It is an innovative regulatory experiment that could work as a model for other countries, including the UK; and will anyway impact any non-EU company operating on EU markets.
The talk will summarize the causes, context and provisions of the DMA, focusing on the sections that could be more significant for the open source industry and for the supporters of open standards and interfaces.
Vittorio Bertola is an engineer, policy expert and activist, currently running the innovation and policy activities at Open-Xchange, a global leader in free software email and DNS platforms, maker of Dovecot and PowerDNS. In the past he founded startups, campaigns, Usenet newsgroups and political parties, served on the Board of ICANN and on United Nations Internet governance groups, wrote unnecessarily complex Perl scripts, and argued online about a lot of things with a lot of people.
