Imagine a handful of companies which own every piece of infrastructure in your city. One company owns every road, every sign, every map. Thats their platform: they decide which streets are visible and where traffic flows. That is the state of the internet today. A few companies with quasi-monopolistic standing that set the rules for the entire web. Long gone is the dream of a decentralised democratic “sharing economy” — the reality is a “platform economy”, where platforms like Amazon, Instagram, or the App Store can decide who and what is relevant.
But is there another way? Can we build platforms that internalise the early ideas of the internet — a decentralised network of information and commerce?
That was the leading question of the paper by Fabian Stiehle, Markus Funke, Patricia Lago, Ingo Weber: Designing Value-Based Platforms: Architectural Strategies Derived from the Digital Markets Act, which was accepted as a short paper at ICSA 2026. A Preprint is available here.
The EUs Digital Markets Act provides a first judicial attempt to bear with the consequences of the anti-competitive markets these platforms have created.
However, what does this mean for the architecture of platforms? Can the DMA guide platform design?
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, they investigated the DMA from a technical perspective and derived eight high-level design strategies that serve as fundamental approaches towards design goals like ‘fair practice’, or ‘user choice’ (as envisioned by the DMA). They also investigated how compliance with the DMA has been achieved.
While the DMA obligations challenge existing platform designs, they also create new opportunities for designing services within these huge ecosystems. Thus both the strategies are discussed.
This work is a first step towards filling this pressing gap in the architecture of platform ecosystems, i.e., how to incorporate abstract human values—like fairness—in their architecture.
We wish to congratulate Fabian Stiehle, Markus Funke, Patricia Lago and Ingo Weber on their upcoming publication and presentation at the ICSA 2026.
The research is partially funded by the Network Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam through the Network Institute Research Visit program that hosted Fabian Stiehle in 2025.