Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets
We are a coalition of 50+ companies coming from 16 countries (12 Member States).
Join us if you are a technology firm in the European market and support open, interoperable and competitive markets.
We are writing to you as the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, which represents 50+ companies from 16 countries (12 Member States) as well as the European DIGITAL SME Alliance, a business association of more than 45,000 digital SMEs, to urge you to include and support in the upcoming Digital Markets Act the stronger upfront rules for dominant “gatekeeper” firms detailed below. Such requirements are key to unleashing Europe’s economic potential and empowering market challengers to ultimately stand a chance for becoming global tech leaders.
Digital markets where incumbent companies already benefit from large user bases are extremely hard to challenge due to the so-called “network effect”, even when other companies and startups conceive better, more innovative products. Gatekeepers build closed ecosystems - “walled gardens” - through the lack of interoperability, and then use bundling and self-preferencing to expand them into other products and services. Enforcing competition, consumer choice and interoperation with other service providers would allow European challengers to compete on the merits of their services.
The Digital Markets Act holds the potential to solve the above issues and unleash the European internet industry. To move away from those walled gardens, we urge you to ensure that the DMA tackles barriers to interoperability, bundling and anticompetitive default setting through pre-installation.
We hope you will seize this opportunity.
The Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets is an initiative launched by European companies in October 2021. It aims to advance fairness and stronger openness in digital markets, allowing businesses of all sizes to compete on fair grounds. This is why we focus on the aspects of 1) Interoperability; 2) Pre-installation & default settings; and 3) Bundling; in the negotiations around the Digital Markets Act. This is a crucial time to take action for competition and innovation in Europe. And we need your voice.