 Hello everybody. You are very welcome to today's IIA webinar. I'm Seamus Allen, Digital Policy Researcher here at the IIA. Today we're delighted to be joined by Owen O'Neill, Senior Policy Officer in the Platforms Policy and Enforcement Directorate of the European Commission. Owen is going to speak to us for about 20 to 25 minutes on the topic of the Digital Markets Act and then we'll go to a discussion and a Q&A. You can join the Q&A using the button on the bottom of your screen. Please include your name and the name of your organisation. A reminder that today's event is on the record and you can also join the conversation by tweeting using the handle at IIA. Owen, thank you so much for joining us today and I'll hand over to you now. The floor is yours. Excellent Seamus. Thank you very much for setting this up and make this happen. Delighted to be here. Greetings from Brussels to everybody. Downtown has been invaded by tractors as we speak, so I'm coming to you from my home which is much more quiet than what's happening downtown as we speak. But listen, I'm not here to talk about tractors. I'm here to talk about the Digital Markets Act specifically with an emphasis on what the Digital Markets Act means for start-ups, SMEs, spin-offs and by extension also investors. Now to guide me through this and the messages I want to pass on to you, I do have a deck of slides which will be pulled up here now. Excellent. So I'm going to put the thesis I'm going to put forward here today is that the DMA, the Digital Markets Act, is an opportunity engine for start-ups. So bear with me as I walk through this. So yeah, I'm coming to you from Brussels and I want to let you in on a secret, the Brussels secret and that is very simple. It's WLA. In Brussels, in the commission, WLA, we love acronyms and in particular, take us to the next slide, three LA. We love three letter acronyms and take it to the next slide. There's one three-letter acronym we are particularly proud of. We think it is the mothership of three letter acronyms and that is the DMA which stands for indeed the Digital Markets Act. And today I want to unpack that for you but with an emphasis on what it means downstream for smaller actors, SMEs, start-ups, spin-offs in particular. Next slide please. Vital, totally simple and obvious point but I insist on making it. The DMA is not a proposal, it's not a wish list. It is the law of the EU. It is confirmed, it's in the bag, it has come through the legislative process and now it's about implementation and enforcement. Next slide please. What's the scope of the DMA? First of all, the goal here is to ensure that gatekeepers of digital marketplaces are behaving fairly with the view to ensuring the contestability for digital markets. Now, as part of this, we have identified large online platforms, gatekeepers in these digital marketplaces. Their compliance started earlier this month, 7th of March. Next slide please. One thing to keep in mind, the DMA is an absolutely massive piece of legislation. It comes in a 39,602 words and those of you who study German for your leaving cert, you have an advantage here because the German language version is a good 3,000 words less than the English language version. But let me do something here. Let me take these 39,602 words and boil it down to two words. Next slide please. What you're looking at there is the formal title of the Digital Markets Act and the first two most semantically significant words in that title, two clicks there please, are contestable and fair. Those two words I put it to you capture succinctly the essence of the Digital Markets Act. It's all about trying to deliver contestable and fair markets in the digital sector, full stop. Now, let's try and unpack some key dimensions of what this means. Next slide please. The core platform, in the DMA, we have this concept of defined core platform services and so far 22 core platform services have been identified across six different gatekeepers. You can one more click please. So the core platform services encompass search, for example, social networking, video sharing, operating systems. The 22 map then to their corporate owners, the gatekeepers, six of whom have been designated formally so far, listed there on the left hand side. The obligations for those gatekeepers and their designated core platform services kicked in earlier this month. Next slide please. Vital question, does the DMA bring any new obligations to startups or SMEs? Click it there please. None, not one, nothing. The only obligations, legal obligations that the DMA brings fall into the lap of the gatekeepers on the previous slide. There is no new regulatory burdens or barriers created by the DMA. No new legal obligations on startups or SMEs because of the DMA. Next slide please. On the contrary, I put it to the house today that the DMA only brings opportunities for startups or SMEs. Next slide. Exhibit A, click data portability. Let me walk you through this here. Under article 69 and 610, since the 7th of March, end users of gatekeeper services will be empowered to port their data elsewhere. Now this is with a view to promoting multi-homing, user switching, to give competitors an entrance, a chance to capture a new stream of demand, even propose new competitive offers. And it's enabling business users to also secure free of charge, effective, high quality, continuous and real-time access to and use of aggregated and non-aggregated data that is generated by their apps on gatekeeper or platform services. One more click. Yeah, there's something gone wrong here, but listen, what I would, the point I want to make here with this box here is this is opening up a whole new set of opportunities for data-driven services. But the key here is the ball is in the court of other parties to create services that incentivize users to take advantage of the data portability opportunities. These articles and the obligations they bring on their own are not enough. They're creating the conditions for data to be ported, for example, out of a gatekeeper service and to a third-party service, but that's not enough on its own. We need innovators, startups, SMEs, other actors, other than gatekeepers to come up with new ideas, new services that incentivize users to take advantage of these new data portability opportunities brought about by the DMA. Next slide, please. Exhibit B, ranking, query, click and view data. Next slide. What's happening here under article 611 of the DMA is that new and emerging companies in the search engine space will be able to secure anonymized, ranking, query, click and view data from any search engine designated as a gatekeeper. As of now, there's only one search engine that is a core platform service designated under the DMA, and that is Google's Alphabet's Google Search Service. Since the 7th of March, Google Search has the obligation to provide anonymized, ranking, query, click and view data to any search engine that requests it. Now, this data needs to relate to both free and paid search data generated by users of that search engine, Google. The goal here is to help new and emerging search engines improve their performance so that it's on a par with the biggest players out there. What's vital here, and it's something that we're going to be watching very carefully, is that the ranking, query, click and view data provided by Google to those who request it is materially useful, is meaningful, that it's not just some modest 2 megabyte-sized CSV file or something, but that it is big enough and comprehensive enough to be materially useful to the search engine that is trying to create a model and use to underpin their search engine service, their competing search engine service. Next slide, please. I want to exhibit C here. Now, here are some provisions, six of them that are relevant to gatekeeper app stores. Next slide. First up, conditions of access for business users. Gatekeepers shall apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions, or FRAND as the acronym goes. These conditions of access for business users. In one sense, maybe the legislators here could have packed up their tent and gone home having said, yeah, everything needs to be fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, which has a legal meaning in terms of the general conditions of access. But the legislators decided that, no, this was sort of setting the scene in terms of what's expected in terms of the conditions and their nature, but to then dig into more detail on specific provisions more granular in nature relating to app stores. Next slide. We'll go to the second of these six, even though it says seven at the bottom on the right-hand side. Anyway, gatekeepers under Article 6.4 shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use on their operating system of third-party software application stores, and also enable side-loading that third-party software applications can be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform service. As in, you can download the install file outside of an app store and install it on your operating system. This is happening since the 7th of March. You may have seen articles in the press already about Apple allowing third-party app stores, Epic Games, are, for example, taking advantage of this opportunity. Also, Apple have confirmed that side-loading will be allowed in the iOS because of the DMA. Article 6.4. Next slide, please. Direct communication with users. Article 5.4. Under the DMA, there is this intermediary role that app stores have once an app is downloaded, but business users will be able to communicate with users of their app outside the app store. This greatly improves those communication channels and gives more empowers business users to contact their users and interact with them outside of the app store. Next slide, please. This is an interesting one. Article 5.7. The usage of all terms of payment systems, browser engines, and ID services in a mobile operating system environment. Gatekeepers shall not require end- and business users to use, offer, interoperate with that gatekeeper's browser engine, payment system, or identification services. It opens up these operating system ecosystems to other browser engine possibilities, payment systems, or identification services and not just to use the service in those three areas offered by the gatekeeper. Next slide. Article 6.5. Fair ranking. When it comes to the ranking of apps in an app store, gatekeepers shall not favor their own products or services compared to similar services or products of a third party. Equally transparent, fair, and non-discriminatory conditions should be applied to all rankings. This is very interesting, the question of transparency on how rankings of apps in app stores will be done. It's an obligation now under Article 6.5. Next slide, please. Now, this is the sixth provisions relating to app stores that I want to present to you today. Under Article 6.2, gatekeepers, there's some boundaries put on gatekeeper's use of data generated on their platform by business users. When a gatekeeper is in competition with business users, that gatekeeper cannot use data generated by those business users on their platform. For example, to develop new competing apps or services or products can't be done. So that concludes the six provisions relating to the app stores that I wanted to cover, but I want to move on to the next slide to exhibit D, which is interoperability of messaging apps. Next slide. Starting this month, designated gatekeeping messenger apps, which is met as WhatsApp, have to publish a reference offer that explains the terms under which it will provide interoperability. Third parties can then request interoperability on the basis of the reference offer published by that gatekeeper with the relevant messaging app. Now, the interoperability needs to happen within three months of receiving a reasonable request from a third-party messaging service. There are some conditions where the gatekeeper receiving such a request can legitimately turn down the interoperability request. For example, if the encryption levels of the third-party messaging app are lower than the encryption levels being offered by the gatekeeper's messaging service. But otherwise, there is a three-month window by the end of which the interoperability needs to happen basically. Next slide. Now, the reference offer must offer interoperability for end-to-end text messaging between two individual end users and also to allow file sharing between two individual end users, images, voice messages, videos, etc. However, next slide. What's intriguing is that over time the reference offer actually needs to expand. So I've just talked about how it was at the moment is between two individual end users. But come September next year, the messaging apps must expand their reference offer and it must include interoperability between groups of end users. And it doesn't stop there. Roll on another two years to September 2027 and the reference offer needs to include the possibility of interoperable end-to-end voice and video calls between users, individuals and groups. So now individuals September next year, groups and September 2027 voice and video calls between individuals and groups. Next slide. Excuse the overlay here of the text formatting thing in this Zoom environment, but no problem. What I want to highlight here is Dick Brower, engineering director of WhatsApp, explained in a very interesting article in Wired back last month on how WhatsApp is going to be interoperable. URL to the article is there. Next slide. And there's also, and I'll come back to this in a few moments, there's also more technical details in terms of the reference offer that's in the public domain from Meta regarding WhatsApp. But now to Exhibit E, the final of these exhibits I wanted to run through with you today. Access to hardware and software features of an operating system. Next slide. Under article 67 of the DMA, providers of services and hardware will be allowed to interoperate free of charge with hardware or software features that are accessed or controlled via an operating system that has been designated as a core platform service. For example, if a developer wants to access the antenna of the NFT payment part of an iPhone, they will now be able to secure access to that antenna. For example, if their app wishes to make use of that, for example, of making payments. But next slide. And already Apple have published a request form for those developers wishing to access its APIs under this very article. So all of these extra hardware and software features within an OS now can be accessed. Next slide. So I put it to you that on the basis of these, this is not even exhaustive what I've covered here today, but on the basis of such obligations and provisions in the DMA, I put it to you that the landscape across the EU, especially for startups with data in their DNA, is about to undergo a very radical and even unprecedented shift. Next slide. I want to highlight something about how this is being done. Just click there, please. This is what I would characterize as an all-inclusive process. Before the 7th of March, the commission had very active interactions with the gatekeepers in terms of the compliance solutions they were shaping. And then on the 7th of March, compliance reports submitted by the gatekeepers were submitted to the commission. A public version is already available via the commission's website, one for each of the gatekeepers. Next bullet point, please. But input is being sought from all relevant stakeholders on the compliance proposals from gatekeepers. This is not just the commission talking to the gatekeepers. Next slide. First bullet point, please. For example, in terms of engagement with relevant stakeholders, the commission has organized six public workshops, one for each gatekeeper. They started last Monday, last week. And these six workshops conclude today. And as I sit here and speak to you, downtown in Brussels and streaming over the internet, although downtown surrounded by 300 tractors as it would seem, the last of these six workshops is taking place. And it's Microsoft who are walking through their compliance solutions in these workshops. Next bullet point. Yes, it's online. The participants can and have been over these last week been asking questions directly to the gatekeepers. And we, the commission, are in the process of assessing the compliance solutions put forward in the compliance reports to see if they are indeed respecting the spirit of the DMA. And the interactions that are happening in the workshops will also be taken into account in that ongoing assessment of the compliance solutions. Next slide, please. What I want to really make clear here to you is be you engineers, founders, we need your help. Are these compliance solutions good enough? What were you expecting? What were you needing? What is missing? Please do tell us. Yes, there was the opportunities of the workshops. If you miss them, no problem. We have more traditional channels, email even, and an email address there to flag and send through any feedback on the compliance solutions in terms of what you expect. So I would urge you to spread the word. If there are, if you or others you're in touch with have any feedback on this, do not hesitate to send it through to us. But listen, we're now in the DMA world, and there's, I'd like to highlight, you know, the possibility for seizing opportunities here. Next click. Investors, re-evaluate your strategies. Look at your portfolio. Is it DMA ready? Are there opportunities within your DMA, your portfolio companies for them to seize? Innovators, startups, SMEs, identify market opportunities on the back of these new obligations of these massive digital gatekeepers. Adapt your offerings, if not even expand your offerings accordingly. Next click. The key here, however, is really, you know, DMA is happening. It's not tomorrow, it's not next month, it is happening right now. And the time to start getting ready, BU Investors are innovating is now. Investors, talk to your founders, your CEOs. CTOs, talk to your CEOs. Board members, talk to your founders, your CEOs and, you know, get these reflections going, get ready, you know, make sure awareness grows and under an eventual understanding from which can flow action. Next up. Speaking of the word action, regulatory action alone is absolutely not enough. Next click. Investors, innovators, next click. You clearly have your part to play. We, on the enforcement side, will do our best in analyzing and with the powers we have, and making sure that the compliance solutions are, you know, respect the spirit of the DMA and are ultimately helpful when we go back to those key words earlier. No, you can go back a second. I want to stay on the up. And when I go back to those two key words of within the title of fairness and contestability, you know, we will get busy and we are busy on the enforcement side already and assessing the, and if necessary, taking legal action and there was even stuff in the press yesterday, you may have seen about the commission taking action against three of the gatekeepers in terms of some of the compliance solutions they put forward. But what I want to say to you really here is the ball is in your court. SMEs, startups, investors, those out there, to seize these opportunities, be aware of them, understand them and ultimately seize the opportunities by taking action. You can be reassured that the commission is going to work and is already working diligently on the enforcement of the DMA and with the new powers we have, but it's not enough. Others need to step up and take advantage of this new world, especially the innovative class out there. Certainly, SMEs, startups, and by extension, investors looking for new investment opportunities. Should we succeed? Even half succeed in making some of these digital markets more contestable back to that essential word I highlighted earlier. If a market is contestable, it's equally investable. The DMA has as its goal to make markets up to now not very contestable, more contestable, and investors that can open opportunities to. Next slide please. So yeah, loads of info on the Digital Markets Act website of the commission, including links to the public compliance reports. Don't hesitate to go deep there, exciting stuff. But next slide. The Digital Markets Act, I put it to you on the basis of just presented that it is, click there please, a regulation of excellence. Or as we in this three letter acronym loving world in Brussels, DMA ROCKS. Delighted to have this chance to present this to you. Equally delighted and looking forward to questions, comments, queries from the audience here today. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much for that one. That was a really excellent overview. And as you said, the DMA is quite huge, so there's a lot to unpick there. So I'll start off with some kind of general questions maybe before we get a bit more specific and maybe look at what some of the specific provisions mean for SMEs and startups. And I'll just give a reminder to the audience again to send in questions using the Q&A button on the bottom of the screen. So to start off with maybe quite a big question. So obviously last year, the gatekeepers were designated. And it was earlier this month that the deadline of application came into effect for them for the specific obligations. And are you able to give us a general sense of the commission's perspective on how much compliance there has been with the DMA so far? Or the type of feedback that maybe you're getting from SMEs and startups for regards to implementing the DMA into reality. Is it going according to plan or SMEs seeing what they were expecting? Are you able to give us just your thoughts on that maybe? First of all, what I can confirm is there was a huge effort on the side of the gatekeepers in terms of mobilizing their legal and engineering teams to come up with compliance solutions. And it would not be prudent of me to make comment or judgment or qualitative assessment of any individual compliance solutions. The work is underway. There are the three gatekeepers where we're going to be investigating further in terms of the compliance solutions put forward. There would be a process associated with that. But there was a massive effort. Our work is underway. It's sensitive. This analysis, but we are active. We're trying to engage and reach out about what the DMA can mean for other parties to raise awareness of it. Then much of the press coverage is focused indeed understandably on the big actors, the six gatekeepers that may expand to seven or eight even booking, for example, in a recent investor call announced that they believe they've reached the threshold for being a gatekeeper in the DMA. There may be a formal process associated with nominating, designating additional gatekeepers. That will be followed. And if indeed we conclude as well, the commission that booking or others have reached the threshold, they will be designated and the six month clock starts to tick. But what I want, the point I wanted to make there was the narrative in the press is very much focused very often on the big actors, these six gatekeepers. That's completely legitimate, completely correct, and completely understandable. But equally as important, but not as prominent in the press, for example, is what it means for other actors. What happens downstream of these compliance solutions? What can it create in terms of opportunities? That's why I'm very happy to have this opportunity today to present and frame the DMA in terms of that and to hopefully spark some reflection and ultimately greater understanding of what it means for smaller actors. But I'm not going to comment qualitatively on compliance solutions generally or specifically. They are out there, there's lots of debate and discussion, and analysis is happening as we speak by ourselves, by the commission with the powers we have of the compliance solutions that have been put forward by the gatekeepers. Perfect. Thank you. And that was one of the points I wanted to bring up actually. So as you said, an awful lot of the media coverage of the DMA and a lot of public discourse about it is very, very heavily focused on the gatekeepers, on the big companies. But obviously a huge part of the DMA is about giving these benefits and opportunities and protections to startups and to SMEs. So I wanted to ask you about your general sense of the awareness of the DMA that's currently out there and what kind of work the commission is doing or what work our other stakeholders should they be doing to raise more awareness about the DMA. And then to couple a question with that, it's something you've already picked up on throughout your presentation about how SMEs can get in contact with the commission. But obviously for the enforcement of the DMA to be effective, I think there needs to be a multi-stakeholder approach that there will be a heavy reliance on SMEs or startups to bring things to the attention of the commission. Would that be true to say? Yes, there's two points there. A level of awareness and the need and value the contributions SMEs can make to the enforcement process. First of all, there is not to my satisfaction sufficient awareness of the DMA and what it can mean among SMEs, startup and investor communities. And that's why there is outreach such as what's happening here today. We've been, this is not the first such moment of trying to outreach. I mean, we had workshops at the Web Summit, the Festival of the Future in Munich, EU startup summit last year. There's been many, many webinars on Zoom that we've been given walking through this with investor communities, pockets around Europe, with startups, with founders. But the commission alone our outreach efforts will not be enough. We need others to take on the role also of absorbing and relaying, amplifying these messages. For example, innovation agencies in member states, for example, maybe Enterprise Ireland in Ireland could play a helpful role in relaying these messages and these opportunities to the community of startups and ultimately investors in Ireland, for example. The commission cannot do it by itself. We need others to step up and also raise awareness in their immediate communities of what the DMA means downstream of these obligations to the gatekeepers. The second related point that you raised, in terms of providing feedback during the enforcement process, absolutely essential. I go back to the label I was using earlier, an all-inclusive outreach process to engage, to secure. We've had these workshops concluding today, one per gatekeeper, in person and online, outreach events like this, old school communication channels like email. In fact, I would position this such that to make SMEs, startups, innovators, those active in the marketplace, trying to seek market opportunities, do not underestimate the value and relevance of the input you can provide into the ongoing enforcement processes. The compliance solutions are out there. All of them are not fully implemented yet, but the approach that the gatekeepers are putting forward, at least the broad brushstroke, and it varies from gatekeeper to gatekeeper because some compliance reports are very long and detailed from some gatekeepers and shorter from others. But there's a lot of information out there. Now, I do accept, given the scope and ambition and the reach of these provisions in the DMA, that it can be overwhelming, but there is information there. If you are a startup founder, you know your business, you may already have come up against some barriers when trying to reach business users or trying to navigate the app world, for example. Maybe you're interested in the search engine space. There are relevant provisions you can dig in, learn more, and ultimately feedback into the evaluation process, your view on the compliance solutions that are out there and how useful or not they are and what could be better. What would you like to see? What is missing? Do not underestimate how relevant and valuable this can be to the enforcement work of the Commission for the DMA. Thank you. That's all really important points. We have a question here from the audience from Sam Alir and he says, will we see the DMA before the European Court soon? That's possibly a question you can comment on, so I might combine it with another one. Just going back to the point of enforcement and before it would go to a court, what kind of resources does the Commission have at its disposal to enforce the DMA and what branch of the Commission is being tasked with? Do you have a sense of what the Commission is going to do when it comes to timelines for enforcement? Okay, I'm just saying some notes here so we can try and address the question in all its dimensions. In terms of the courts, appeals have already been lodged by three of the gatekeepers and there are legal procedures in process that will be followed. However, the point I would and yes, so there will be discussions in the court about the DMA, yes, but what I would like to highlight is that does not change whatsoever the obligations of the gatekeepers, including those who have lodged appeals to comply with the obligations by the 7th of March. So those appeals will run their course, but it doesn't affect my day-to-day work because that doesn't change. Their obligations do not change unless the appeal court rules in favor of them to be seen. Resources and the enforcement of the DMA is being done by the Commission, shared across two DGs, DG Competition and DG Connect where I work. There's well over, there's the order of 100 plus people working on us, yeah, well over 100. And those people are very active, very qualified, very busy and have a lot of work to do. But you can already see, I mean, the work is already resulting in some announcements in terms of investigations being launched by the Commission. So things are getting serious with the resources we have at our disposal and not to neglect or forget about the quite considerable powers the DMA gives the Commission in terms of its enforcement. Timelines, what was the specific question about timelines? I guess something that has been a topic of concern for a long time when it comes to antitrust. So even before the DMA, we've seen antitrust cases in the digital economy where small companies would bring cases against companies that are now gatekeepers. And one of the challenges was very often cases could go on for years, and obviously the DMA is intended to partly fix that. But I guess one of the problems that SMEs sometimes worry about is, what if it takes too long for enforcement to happen? Maybe the remedy comes about, but maybe it's already too late for an SME. I would point to the news yesterday with the investigations that were announced by the Commission. Within one month of the compliance deadline, the Commission is already launching investigations. From that, I think one could extrapolate that we intend and we are moving fast in terms of taking action where we have doubts about the some compliance solutions put forward. We're not sitting on our thumbs. How fast that will be in terms of the market and its evolution and so forth is another question I'm not going to speculate on. You could have 10 different people lined up and they could give 10 different answers. But yesterday's news about the investigations launched by the Commission, we are moving fast as signaled by that news of yesterday. Perfect. We have a question from Janice Alexandres from the Public Affairs Consultancy here in Dublin. So they're asking about the interim measures that are in the DMA. They're particularly asking about the announcement yesterday and can the interim measures be used in that context, but could you give us a general sense about some of the interim measures that the DMA allows the Commission to take? I'd rather not go into that sort of detail here today, because the main thing I want to really bring home is DMA is happening. DMA is relevant to smaller actors. You need to understand it because there are opportunities that can be seized, not by everybody, but by many. The Commission will do its work, is doing its work in terms of enforcement and taking action. We want feedback from these communities, these innovator communities to help us with that enforcement work. But we want, that's not something the innovators need to worry about. We will worry about that, but we want you to worry about the extended community here about understanding and taking action. Or we go back to the SMEs. A broad general question is just to do with perspectives in the United States on the DMA. So when the DMA first came out, and even before it came out, there was an awful lot of voices who perceived it as being a very protectionistic anti-American measure. And I think in recent years, we've seen a massive shift in the United States. We see the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, coming out with policies or proposals that are potentially as radical, in some cases even more. So I'm wondering, are you able to maybe just give a very general comment on that? Are there still some frictions with the US regarding it, or has there been a very major shift in how they see the DMA? I think it is fair to say in the United States of America there's a lot of interest among policymakers and regulators in the DMA. The DMA is without any hesitation the most ambitious, far-reaching regulatory action in the area of digital markets, where there has been many, many voices for many, many years saying there's some regulatory action could be helpful here. The EU has moved fast, that's debatable, but has moved with ambition in this space. Now in terms of this geographic question, is it anti-American or so forth? All I will say is of the six gatekeepers so far, it's not all American companies. We have ByteDats, the corporate owner of Piktok, originally a Chinese company. I mentioned earlier that booking, which was founded in the Netherlands by a Dutch man, has recently announced that it believes it has met the thresholds. So let's take this right back to those two words. It is about fairness and it's about contestability in marketplace. Many of the actors who meet the thresholds have their corporate headquarters indeed in the United States of America, but not all. And indeed the numbers in order to be designated under the DMA are not tied in any way to geography. It's tied to an objective footprint you have in the EU marketplace, which means you are at a scale where you have huge influence on digital markets and that with such an impressive footprint, so you now have some new obligations to operate in a fair and contestable way in the EU. There's great ambition here and I think it's even something that the EU can be proud of and its citizens too, that we are taking very serious action here well ahead of other territories in the US. My sense is that there are many pockets that would like to see action that would be taken, but the legislative process doesn't work as smoothly or efficiently as it does in the EU. I'm not saying it's smoother efficient in the EU because it is a complicated legislative process, but it delivers. The EU, a legislative process involving the Commission, the Parliament, the EU Council has managed across 27 different member states to deliver a comprehensive agreement on a comprehensive package addressing the biggest actors in the digital market well ahead of other territories. And indeed, I think it would be safe to say that there are many around the world that are inspired by what is within the DMA and would look to see how maybe elements or more than a few elements of it could be brought to their policy world and regulating their marketplaces. But yeah, the EU is leading here. To pick up on a few points you just mentioned there, the first one I might ask, have you had much engagement with regulators, say in the likes of the United Kingdom or South Korea and elsewhere on these issues and on their interest in the DMA? I haven't, but I know there's great interest and great attention being given by regulators in other territories on the DMA and they're watching very carefully at this moment in time as we step into the enforcement. There is great interest out there. Picking up on your point about the quantitative thresholds for gatekeepers, something that I think probably is relevant for SMEs and startups and something that they probably would want to know. Not necessarily all the services provided by the gatekeepers, and you had a slide on this, are going to be applicable for the DMA. There are some services they provide that haven't been counted for qualitative reasons. I'm wondering, could you give us a sense? What kind of factors are considered by the commission? So for example, if something does reach a quantitative threshold, but sometimes the commission has said, actually we won't designate this under the DMA. So we've seen this in cases with the likes of Gmail or Outlook for example. Alternatively, if an SME wanted to come to the commission and say, actually this service provided by a gatekeeper doesn't quite reach the quantitative threshold. But we believe for qualitative reasons that actually it shows a lot of gatekeeper-like characteristics. What kind of principles would be relevant there? Do you have any sort of idea how an SME would go about doing that? Well listen, I gave the email earlier in the public domain for questions about the DMA that any SME wants to send through to us. I positioned it in terms of the hot question of the day, which is an ongoing analysis of the compliance solutions. However, that channel can be used that old school email channel could be used by an SME who wants to raise any such questions that they may have about a major service being offered by be it a current gatekeeper or maybe a potential future gatekeeper. These interactions are vital. Yes, we keep our eyes very closely on the evolutions in the marketplace and we've had very intense interactions. For example, you mentioned Gmail with Alphabet on Gmail. Details of which I won't go into, but our conclusion indeed was that Gmail would not be a service that we would designate as a core platform service under the DMA. But what I would put to SMEs is it's an SME or a startup, a spin-off, any smaller company that has ambition to grow. The thresholds are huge here and it's a great thing to aim for, to become a gatekeeper. I mean, if you're addressing user-based, that's the order of 10% of the population of the EU, should you get even close to that? That's a major, major success. Don't worry about the DMA. Don't worry about its enforcement. You'll worry about what you think it could be doing for you, what you think is not there, feed it through to us. We will take that very seriously on board, but don't be distracted by the minute of the DMA. Understand the broad brush opportunities it can create and see how that can apply to your business. Take action, start embedding this into your reflections, into your reflexes, be you the CEO, the CTO or even on the developer side. Understand what it can mean. Bake it into how you're shaping and preparing your business for the future and even discuss with your investors. Get there, take on it as well. It is a new world. There is no legislation with reach and ambition like the DMA. We are still in the early days. This is a landscape that's going to move and shift as new gatekeepers come in. New core platform services are added. For example, ByteDance, where I mentioned a few moments ago, have already flagged that they think their advertising service engine qualifies as a core platform service. Current gatekeepers may end up having additional core platform service too. The landscape is going to shift and evolve new gatekeepers, new core platform services, evolving compliance solutions. There's the core cases that are ongoing. There's the investigations launched by the Commission. It's very dynamic. Not to mention the impact of AI and the whole pipeline of action that is happening there. The key thing is in this new world, for smaller enterprises, understand, be aware and take action, seize the opportunities and let us know if things are not as helping you as you thought they would in the DMA world. You mentioned about how there's so much shifting, so much evolution going on in this landscape. A lot of the time when the Commission works on policies, it talks about future proofing regulation. It often talks about being technology neutral. We have a question from Noel O'Regan. They are asking, will the DMA be refued in future and how that will work to effectively meet its objectives? They're saying that technology changes at a very fast rate. Of course, it's very early days for the DMA. It's very early to be asking this, but given how rapid the pace of technological change is, is the DMA ready to be future proof, do you think? The DMA is adaptable. We will, at late next year, be looking into already impact assessment of the DMA. Things are going to move incredibly fast. Look at AI in the last 18 months. Now, we also now have the AI Act, but it's another beast which has only had its vote last week in the European Parliament. This implementation will now happen over the coming years, scaling up. The DMA, it is adapted, has to be adaptable. Again, I put it to the innovative community of, with smaller actors, to use the channels with the Commission, to feed through to us. Thoughts, concerns that you're seeing in the marketplace, or relating specifically as well to compliance solutions and how they are useful. Sorry for repeating this, but we need that input. It's incredibly valuable, and the time for it to come in is right now. Looking at some of the criticism of the DMA that's been put out there, some of the gatekeepers in particular, but some others as well, they've particularly said that there could be security risks from the DMA. This comes to, for example, when there's alternative app stores, or for example, messaging app interoperability. I'm wondering, are you able to comment on that? Is there security risks? Does the DMA have provisions to deal with that? An interesting one here on terms of the security. There's been a lot of discussion in the press, for example, in the context of Apple, iOS, now having to allow side-loading of apps, not to mention third-party app stores, and that you're positioning this as opening up new security threats and so forth. But the thing is, if we take Apple, for example, Apple has the Mac operating system as well, and their side-loading is possible and has been. And so the engineering beat of delivering an operating system that allows side-loading and to do so in a way that is acceptably secure, be it to the company or its customers, Apple have achieved that with Mac OS. So the engineering capabilities to do so are in-house. If they've done it for Mac OS, there's an opportunity for them equally to allow side-loading in iOS in a way that is secure. And the engineering talent are there, and the experience in delivering it is also there. When it comes to the frowned principles, so being fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory, and I might couple this with data portability as well, I'm wondering, are you able to give us a kind of concrete sense on what that would look like in reality, and what we've seen so far? What would be a breach of frowned principles of being fair and reasonable? From the perspective of an SME, so if they're on an app store or trying to access a search engine, the DMA says that there's conditions of access, but it doesn't give a right of access. Now, I'm not a lawyer. I am an engineer. I am not going to get caught up in a legal analysis of what frowned would look like or not. I'm not going to go there. Okay, that's perfect. You can comment on everything in it, but those are some of the provisions that I guess have gotten particular interest in the DMA. Another question, and maybe you won't want to comment on this due to the legal technicalities, but just how the DMA may interact and overlap with other legislation. And I understand that DMA is maximum harmonisation, but I believe that there is also scope for EU member states to have their own competition rules, and in some cases they may apply or interpret them to the digital economy. So I'm wondering, would you be able to comment on that and also maybe comment on the role of national regulators? So obviously it's the commission's job to enforce the DMA, but what role, if any, is there for the national regulators? Yeah, national regulators, national competition authorities, they have their ear close, very close to the ground, and also have very good networks with innovators and companies in their country. And they are a valuable conduit of potential problems to the commission, certainly in the area in the context of the Digital Markets Act. So we are working carefully and closely with, as we have on antitrust questions for many years with competition authorities, that will continue in the DMA world. And we also see that competition authorities can be a network that flag potential problems in digital marketplaces that could be addressed or could fall under the powers of the DMA. Perfect. Going back to the reviews of the DMA, so there will be a review of the DMA, and is it three years, is the timeline? I don't know, I can't tell you exactly, but I know we are going to be, we're already anticipating working on this next year, certainly late next year. Okay, perfect. And can you give us how many people are currently working on the DMA and the European Commission? You said it's shared responsibility between DG Comp and DG Connect, is that correct? It's over a hundred, I do not have the exact number. Okay, thank you. So I think we're running out of time, but thank you so much for joining us, Owen. So that was a really interesting overview and a really interesting presentation. We make sure that our audience have accessed your email if they want to contact you about the DMA and enforcement. And thank you to our audience for their questions. And thank you again for joining us and hopefully we can welcome you to Dublin in the near future. Excellent, Seamus. Listen, thank you and to the team at the IEA, for giving me the chance. I'm delighted to have had this and I just put it to the participants. Please pass this on. Bring this up be it in meetings at the water cooler. The DMA is happening. The DMA is not just about the big gatekeepers, it's also about smaller actors and let's raise awareness on ultimately action from smaller actors who can benefit from the DMA. This is key. It's not just an action of the commission to police the big actors. It's also to create opportunities. Don't forget about that. Pass the word on and let's get plenty of innovators across Ireland and the EU taking advantage of the DMA.