These 6 Companies Are Big Tech 'Gatekeepers,' European Commission Says
The European Commission has designated its first six gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, and they're probably not a surprise: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft.
The goal of the DMA is to foster healthy competition among tech companies by creating a level playing field among social networks, search engines, video-sharing platforms, operating systems, cloud systems, and more. It went into effect in May, but the first order of business was to determine who would be covered by the DMA and designated as a "gatekeeper."
The commission today kicked off that process, and also identified 22 core services that earned the six companies their status. Companies can appeal and the commission will decide whether or not the appeal is worthy by February 2024. In either case, companies have six months to bring their core services into compliance with the new regulations.
Several services from Microsoft (Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising) and Apple (iMessage) will temporarily escape scrutiny. Both companies argue that those products do not qualify as gatekeepers given competiton in the market; the commission said today that it has opened "market investigations" to see if those arguments hold up. The EU will rule on those four services within five months.
The commission will also investigate whether iPadOS can be exempt from the DMA, and says it will rule on that within a year.
Three services have formally escaped the DMA: Gmail, Outlook.com, and Samsung Internet Browser. Although they "meet the thresholds under the DMA to qualify as a gatekeeper, Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung provided sufficiently justified arguments showing that these services do not qualify as gateways for the respective core platform
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