EU Designates Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Google, Meta, and Microsoft as ‘Gatekeepers’

The European Commission has released today its list of companies that it has designated as “gatekeepers” under its new Digital Markets Act. Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta, and Microsoft are the six gatekeepers that will have six months to make changes to some of their services to comply with the DMA.

Overall, the EU Commission has identified 22 core platform services across 8 different categories that will need to be updated to “ensure the openness of important digital services.” This is going to affect a lot of popular platforms including Windows, iOS, Android, the App Store and Google Play, Google Chrome, Safari, Google Search, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook (and Messenger), Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn, to name a few.

The EU Commission has also opened four new investigations to determine if Microsoft Bing, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Advertising, iMessage should be qualified as core platform services. Moreover, the Commission is also investigating if iPadOS should be designated as a “gatekeeper” even though the platform doesn’t meet the thresholds. One of the criteria to qualify as a gatekeeper is to have a user base of over 45 million monthly active users in the EU.

Even though services like Gmail, Outlook.com, and Samsung’s Internet Browser did meet the criteria to be qualified as core platform services, the EU Commission said that “Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung provided sufficiently justified arguments showing that these services do not qualify as gateways for the respective core platform services.” Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that Apple and Microsoft had separately argued with the Commission to have iMessage and Bing excluded from the EU’s gatekeepers list.

Effective immediately, gatekeepers now have to inform the Commission of any acquisition projects. These six companies also have six months to comply with the various obligations laid down by the Digital Markets Act, otherwise, they could be facing fines up to 10% of their total worldwide turnover.

As the DMA currently covers ten different types of core platform services, the obligations gatekeepers will need to respect will differ depending on the type of service. As an example, Apple will need to allow users to install apps from other sources than the App Store, and iMessage will need to become interoperable with other messaging apps. Operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android will also need to allow users to uninstall inbox apps and change app defaults easily.

“In case of systematic infringements, the Commission is also empowered to adopt additional remedies such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it or banning the gatekeeper from acquisitions of additional services related to the systemic non-compliance,” the EU Commission said today.

Overall, these strict DMA rules represent an important milestone in the EU Commission’s efforts to enforce new pro-competition rules. This is going to be a big deal for these big companies, especially Apple, which still doesn’t allow third-party app stores or other web browser engines on iOS. “Our focus will be on how we mitigate these impacts and continue to deliver the very best products and services to our European customers,” Apple said in a statement shared with Reuters today.