EU Digital Markets Act — Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (ex-ante competition framework for digital gatekeepers)

Mechanism

The DMA departs from the EU's traditional ex-post competition enforcement (Articles 101–102 TFEU) in favour of a structural ex-ante rulebook for firms that function as digital gatekeepers. A firm qualifies as a gatekeeper when it provides at least one Core Platform Service (CPS) in the EU, has significant impact on the internal market (proxied by €7.5bn EU turnover or €75bn market capitalisation over the preceding three years), operates a CPS that is an important gateway for business users to reach end users (proxied by 45m monthly active end users and 10,000 annual active business users in the EU), and enjoys an entrenched and durable position.

Once designated, gatekeepers face two categories of obligations across their designated CPS:

Article 5 — per se obligations (self-executing, no regulatory fine-tuning needed):

• No combining personal data across CPS without explicit, informed, freely given consent
• No using business users' non-public data to compete against them
• Allow third-party app installations ("sideloading") on operating systems
• Allow business users to redirect end users to their own direct channels
• No self-preferencing of gatekeeper's own downstream services in search/ranking
• No tying access to one CPS on acceptance of other CPS

Article 6 — susceptible to specification obligations (Commission may issue implementing acts):

• Interoperability of messaging/social-networking services
• Data portability in real time for end users
• Access to advertising performance measurement tools for third parties
• Fair and non-discriminatory access to app stores (default-setting obligations)
• Access to OS/hardware features to third-party providers

Enforcement: Fines up to 10% of global annual turnover for breach of obligations; up to 20% for repeated infringement; up to 5% of average daily turnover as periodic penalty payments. For systematic infringement (three adjudicated breaches in eight years), the Commission may impose structural remedies up to and including mandatory divestiture. The Commission is the exclusive enforcer; national competition authorities may support but not lead proceedings.

Gatekeeper designation timeline:

Downstream implications

• App-store economics restructured: Apple and Alphabet must allow alternative app distribution and third-party payment processing within the EU, materially reducing the 15–30% app-store commission take on digital goods and in-app purchases for EU-resident transactions. Affects gaming (mobile), fintech, e-commerce, and streaming sectors that distribute via iOS/Android.
• Advertising-stack transparency: Alphabet (Google Ads) and Meta must provide real-time access to performance-measurement data and bidding data to third-party advertisers — narrows the data-moat advantage in EU programmatic advertising.
• Messaging interoperability: Meta's WhatsApp must allow third-party messaging clients to interoperate (Article 7 specification obligations under the DMA). Long-term structural shift in EU communications-app market dynamics.
• Search self-preferencing ban: Alphabet must present Google Shopping, Google Maps, Google Flights etc. on equal terms with competing vertical search services — reversing the practice underlying the EU's pre-DMA Google Shopping antitrust cases (AT.39740).
• EU–US regulatory spillover: DMA enforcement investigations (20+ formal DMA probes opened 2024–2025) generate compliance costs and remediation architectures that US BigTech applies globally where technically feasible, producing extraterritorial regulatory effect beyond the EU.
• Structural divestiture risk: The systematic-infringement clause (three adjudicated breaches → mandatory divestiture possible) introduces tail-risk for Alphabet and Apple in particular, given the volume of active non-compliance investigations.

Open questions

• ByteDance (TikTok) DMA compliance status under the national-security cloud from the parallel EU DSA investigation and the US TikTok divestiture pressure — whether ByteDance retains EU gatekeeper designation or whether a forced divestiture triggers a new designation process.
• Microsoft LinkedIn: whether Commission will bring formal non-compliance proceedings on self-preferencing in professional social networking given LinkedIn's integration with Teams and Microsoft 365.
• Whether the Commission will trigger the systematic-infringement escalation path for Apple following the 2025 App Store interoperability non-compliance findings.
• X (formerly Twitter): notified potential gatekeeper status in March 2024; designation decision pending; DMA scope over social-network services not yet formally extended to X.