Recommendation Power: Platform Objectives and the Digital Markets Act

Digital platforms allocate scarce attention through rankings, recommendations, defaults, and prominence. This article develops the concept of recommendation power as the point of intersection between two established concepts: information power and intermediation power, which is the capability to actively steer user choice by a platform that is a bottleneck for effective access. We propose a taxonomy of the objectives that typically guide platforms’ recommendation design, distinguishing an independent-advice benchmark from fifteen other objectives that may motivate systematic departures from it, grouped into direct commercial and data objectives, indirect and strategic objectives, and objectives relating to influence, welfare, and integrity. We then analyze how the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) constrains recommender design, though it does not regulate recommendation power as such. Through obligations on ranking and data and transparency duties as well as through its anticircumvention provisions, the DMA protects certain user choices and access rights from the exercise of recommendation power.