The European Commission and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) have published stakeholder submissions received during a public consultation on draft joint guidance addressing how the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) interacts with existing data protection rules. The initiative, detailed in the article “Commission and EDPB publish contributions to consultation on draft joint guidelines on interplay between DMA” on the European Commission’s Digital Strategy website, represents part of a broader effort to clarify regulatory coordination between competition policy and privacy enforcement within the bloc’s expanding digital rulebook.
The draft guidelines aim to explain how provisions in the DMA should be applied alongside the EU’s data protection framework, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Regulators are seeking to ensure that obligations imposed on large technology platforms designated as “gatekeepers” under the DMA are implemented in a way that remains consistent with EU data protection law. The consultation process invited feedback from companies, legal experts, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders on how the two regulatory regimes should intersect in practice.
A central area of attention concerns the DMA’s restrictions on how gatekeepers combine personal data from different services without user consent. Article 5(2) of the DMA places strict limits on such data processing, requiring explicit permission from users before information gathered from separate platform services can be merged. Because these requirements touch directly on issues already governed by the GDPR, the Commission and the EDPB are working to clarify how enforcement authorities should coordinate their approaches and avoid conflicting interpretations.
According to the Commission, the consultation produced a wide range of perspectives on how oversight responsibilities should be shared between authorities responsible for competition regulation and those enforcing privacy rules. Stakeholders also raised technical and legal questions about how gatekeepers should obtain valid consent, how regulators should exchange information, and how potential disputes between the DMA framework and existing privacy obligations should be resolved.
Publishing the consultation contributions is intended to increase transparency around the policymaking process and allow interested parties to review the range of submissions that may shape the final guidelines. The initiative reflects an ongoing effort by EU institutions to ensure that newly adopted digital market rules operate coherently within the broader regulatory environment governing data protection and consumer rights.
The Digital Markets Act, which began taking effect in 2023, targets the largest online platforms that act as critical intermediaries between businesses and users. It establishes rules designed to curb anti-competitive practices and open digital markets to greater competition. At the same time, the EU’s data protection regime remains one of the world’s most comprehensive privacy frameworks, making the coordination of the two systems a key challenge for regulators.
Once finalized, the joint guidelines are expected to provide practical direction for both industry and enforcement bodies, helping define how the Commission, national data protection authorities, and other regulators cooperate when overseeing gatekeepers’ compliance. The consultation results published by the Commission and the EDPB mark an intermediate step in that process as policymakers move toward issuing a final version of the guidance.
