Designing Value-Based Platforms: Architectural Strategies Derived from the Digital Markets Act

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Digital Markets Act's impact on large digital platform architectures, proposing eight design strategies to embed fairness and user choice, and identifying tactics for compliance and opportunity creation.

Contribution

It introduces eight high-level architectural strategies derived from qualitative analysis of the DMA, filling a gap in understanding how to incorporate human values into platform design.

Findings

Eight design strategies for DMA compliance

Fifteen tactics mapped to these strategies

Opportunities for new service designs within ecosystems

Abstract

The digital markets act (DMA) regulates very large digital platforms like Meta's Facebook or Apple's iOS with the goal to promote fairness, contestability (of market power) and user choice. From a system design or broader technical perspective, the implications of the DMA have not been studied so far. Using systematic methods from qualitative coding and thematic analysis, we investigate the DMA from a technical perspective and derive eight high-level design strategies that serve as fundamental approaches towards value-based architectural goals like 'fair practice', or 'user choice' (as envisioned by the DMA). We investigate how compliance with the DMA has been achieved and derive 15 tactics that we map to our strategies. While the DMA obligations challenge existing platform designs, they also create new opportunities for designing services within these huge ecosystems. We, thus, discuss our strategies in light of both. We see this work as a first step towards filling this pressing gap in the architecture of platform ecosystems, i.e., how to incorporate abstract human values in architecture design.