Digital Markets Act: Commission designates six gatekeepers

The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft - under theDigital Markets Act(DMA). In total, 22 core platform services provided by gatekeepers have been designated. The six gatekeepers will now have six months to ensure full compliance with the DMA obligations for each of their designated core platform services.

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Following their designation, gatekeepers now have six months to comply with the full list of do's and don'ts under the DMA, offering more choice and more freedom to end users and business users of the gatekeepers' services. However, some of the obligations will start applying as of designation, for example, the obligation to inform the Commission of any intended concentration. It is for the designated companies to ensure and demonstrate effective compliance. To this end, they have 6 months to submit a detailed compliance report in which they outline how they comply with each of the obligations of the DMA.

The EC also notes that due to submissions from Apple and Microsoft arguing that iMessage and Bing, Edge, and Microsoft Advertising respectively, do not qualify to be subject to the DMA, the EC has opened four market investigations into these four services to further assess the situation. On top of that, for Gmail, Outlook.com and the Samsung Internet Browser, the EC has concluded that their owners have successfully argued they should not fall under the DMA.

This is one of the biggest pieces of legislation to hit powerful corporations in a long time - especially in tech, which basically has been a wild west free-for-all regulation-wise - and it's going to have some massive consequences for all of us.