Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act entered into force in November 2022 and became fully applicable in May 2023. It designates large online platforms as 'gatekeepers' — companies that are subject to a set of obligations and prohibitions designed to ensure contestable and fair digital markets. As of 2024, the European Commission had designated six gatekeepers covering 22 core platform services, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. Non-compliance carries fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover, rising to 20% for repeat infringers, and structural remedies including break-up orders in the most serious cases.

The Act is the most significant attempt to regulate digital markets in EU history, moving away from after-the-fact antitrust enforcement toward ex-ante rules. Specific obligations include prohibiting self-preferencing, mandatory data portability, interoperability for messaging services, and bans on combining personal data across services without explicit consent. The Commission opened its first formal non-compliance proceedings under the DMA in 2024, with investigations targeting Apple's App Store rules and Meta's advertising practices.

In 2025 the Commission expanded its DMA scrutiny to cloud services, opening probes into AWS and Azure over practices that allegedly make it harder for customers to switch cloud providers — a direct confrontation with the dominant US hyperscalers. Simultaneously, the Brussels fines handed to Apple, Meta, and X under the DMA signalled that the regulation's enforcement phase was accelerating. The Trump administration's reaction — threatening retaliatory tariffs via Section 301 — raised the DMA's geopolitical stakes substantially.