The Official Journal published it on October 12, 2022. Regulation 2022/1925. Sixty-six pages of recitals and articles that rewrote the rules for the largest digital platforms operating in Europe.
The mechanics here are precise. A gatekeeper is not defined by name but by numbers: turnover, market capitalization, user counts in the EU. The regulation does not call out Google or Meta. It does not need to. The thresholds do the work.
Recital (2) of the regulation lists the characteristics that make a platform a gatekeeper: extreme scale economies, very strong network effects, data-driven advantages. Lock-in effects. Lack of multi-homing. Vertical integration. The mechanics here are designed to catch the structure, not the brand.
The catch is in Article 5. Gatekeepers cannot combine personal data from one core platform service with data from any other service they offer — or from third parties — without explicit user consent. A search engine cannot feed on social network data. An operating system cannot harvest browser history for advertising. The regulation calls this a prohibition on leveraging.
Follow the money and the logic becomes clear. The EU argues that cross-service data combination creates an unassailable wall. A new entrant in online advertising cannot compete because the incumbent already knows everything about every user from its other services. The DMA aims to tear down that wall, piece by piece.
It is not about breaking up companies. The regulation forces a separation of data silos. That is a different kind of remedy, and a novel one for the digital economy.
The European Commission would later designate seven gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking.com, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft. Twenty-three core platform services. Six intermediation platforms alone.
Recital (3) acknowledges the structural difficulty: these undertakings exercise control over whole platform ecosystems and are extremely difficult to challenge, irrespective of how innovative or efficient a rival may be.
The law applies only to the giants. Startups and mid-sized firms fall outside the thresholds. The DMA is a bet that the digital economy has become too concentrated. The EU is betting that by forcing gatekeepers to keep their data separate, the market will open up.
Innovation, the thinking goes, will follow.
The question remains how they will respond.
