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In the fall of 2021, the General Court handed down its decision in the Google Shopping case, which found the search engine giant to be guilty of abuse of its dominance under article 102 of the TFEU through self-preferencing. The decision was controversial due to it being based on a novel theory of self-preferencing as a stand-alone form of abuse. Self-preferencing is a highly debated topic in the EU competition law community and has been called the symbol of the Zeitgeist of competition policy.

In an increasingly digitalized world huge parts of the economy have moved online, more specifically onto digital platforms. The technological advancements have created better conditions for business users to reach end users throughout the internal market. This development has not come without a unique set of challenges, however. The digital sector and digital platforms have tendencies that promote an unfair market concentration to a greater extent than in traditional markets. These specific challenges have not always been sufficiently met by the competition rules in the TFEU. The digital sector is new terrain, and it seems to be hard to navigate it in an efficient and appropriate manner using traditional legal tests and competition rules.

In the fall of 2022, a new regulation targeting digital platforms with huge economic power (gatekeepers), entered into force: the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA is made up of a set of ex-ante, blanket rules. If the gatekeepers fail to fulfil the requirements in the DMA, they face huge fines up to 10 % of their annual turnover. The DMA also bans so-called self-preferencing.

This thesis aims to examine whether the novel view that self-preferencing is a stand-alone form of abuse is justified by the specific tendencies of the digital sector and digital platforms, legally certain and justifiable from a competition standpoint. 

The thesis finds that the changes and tendencies in the digital sector, and the novel threats that competition on the internal market faces because of those changes and tendencies, justify ex-ante rules targeting gatekeepers. However, the gatekeepers should be reserved the right to prove through an effects test that their conduct is not restrictive of competition, or justifiable through efficiency claims.