From Consumer Welfare to Fairness: A Functional Framework for Controlling Digital Markets and Beyond Under EU Competition Law

Digital markets have exposed a growing tension at the heart of EU competition law. For decades, the consumer welfare standard has served as its dominant analytical paradigm, shaping both doctrine and enforcement practice. Yet, the rise of data-driven platforms, zero-price services, and algorithmic market power has revealed the limits of this paradigm. In response, fairness has re-emerged as an increasingly prominent yet conceptually ambiguous concept in competition law discourse.

Against this backdrop, this book offers a systematic and original rethinking of the relationship between consumer welfare and fairness. Rather than treating fairness as a competing objectivea vague normative aspiration, it develops a functional perspective in which fairness operates as an analytical tool embedded within Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, rather than as an autonomous regulatory goal. Combining doctrinal analysis, comparative insights, and empirical text-mining of enforcement practice, the study demonstrates that fairness has already been implicitly present in EU competition law discourse. Building on this finding, it proposes a structured framework comprising a proportionality-based fairness test, a behaviour catalogue, and a single gateway rule to reconcile ex ante regulation under the Digital Markets Act with ex post competition enforcement. By bridging theoretical debates, empirical evidence, and practical enforcement design, this work provides a coherent, implementable and forward-looking model for addressing the challenges posed by digital platforms.