Private Enforcement and Platform Regulation: Two GAFA-cases – and What They Tell Us About the Digital Markets Act

Abstract

Private enforcement has been underrated as an enforcement pillar in achieving the aims of competition law. While the focus has been on damages cases in the past years, private enforcement also has a role to play for stopping infringements, particularly with injunctions.
In this contribution, I report two fascinating cases from Germany. Both cases involve digital gatekeepers and both were solved by a first instance court. One case concerns a cooperation agreement of Google with the German government. The other case deals with the deactivation of the Amazon account of a business user. Both cases were dealt with very quickly by the Munich I District Court (Landgericht München I).

The analysis of the cases sheds some light on the potential of private enforcement for “taming Big Tech”. It also holds a lesson for the drafting of the Digital Markets Act: Enforcement should not rest with the European Commission alone. Instead, it should be set out clearly how private users can monitor and remedy infringements of obligations from the Digital Markets Act.

Keywords: Competition law, private enforcement, Google, Amazon, litigation, Digital Markets Act

JEL Classification: K20, K21