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

2026-03-09

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in existing research by systematically operationalizing the Digital Markets Act’s (DMA) core normative goals—fairness, contestability, and user choice—into concrete platform architecture design strategies. For the first time, abstract human values such as fairness and user autonomy are translated into actionable architectural guidance. Through qualitative coding and thematic analysis of DMA regulatory texts and real-world platform compliance practices, the authors derive eight high-level architectural strategies accompanied by fifteen corresponding implementation tactics. This work establishes a novel value-driven architectural framework for digital platforms, offering both theoretical grounding and practical pathways to align platform ecosystems with the DMA’s regulatory imperatives.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Deep Neural Architectures and Foundation Models
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems
• Responsible Web: Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web technologies
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

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.

Problem

• Digital Markets Act
• value-based design
• platform architecture
• fairness
• user choice

Innovation

• value-based architecture
• Digital Markets Act
• platform design
• architectural strategies
• fairness by design