Training national judges for digital competition law: the DMA, private enforcement, and the infrastructure of judicial capacity

The EU has adopted a dense digitalization ‘acquis’, including the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), Data Act, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. Yet these regimes also create a ‘judicial’ order.1 National courts review National Competition Authorities’ (NCAs) decisions, hear injunction and damages actions, manage disclosure and confidentiality, apply the principles of equivalence and effectiveness, and decide whether to refer questions to the Court of Justice. In digital markets, national courts also hear claims framed in contract, tort, or unfair competition law; such disputes may be shaped in substance by platform power, DMA obligations, or competition theories of harm.

Digital competition disputes rarely present as clean doctrinal puzzles. They involve ecosystems and network effects, data advantages, switching costs, app-store rules, ranking and recommendation systems, advertising technologies, interoperability, and design choices. They also intensify familiar procedural issues: information asymmetry, protection of trade secrets and personal data, expert evidence, counterfactual reasoning, and quantification of loss. Courts asked to assess abuse, gatekeeper compliance, or traffic-based harm need enough economic and technical literacy to control evidence and provide reviewable reasons.

This article advances three interrelated propositions about the future of judicial training in Europe, in light of the expansion of EU digital competition law and the expected growing relevance of disputes in national administrative and civil courts. First, competition law judicial training must be updated to reflect the digitalization acquis without treating all judges as a single audience. Secondly, administrative and civil judges require a shared substantive foundation but different advanced tracks. Thirdly, DMA literacy should be integrated into competition law training because DMA obligations and compliance measures will often frame the background (ie facts, evidence, and remedies) even when the formal cause of action remains Article 101 or 102 TFEU or national private law.