The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft - under the Digital 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.
I think the major car companies should also be designated gatekeepers. The modern car is a driving data collection source for the major vendors, and it is high time they are reigned in too.
In parallel, the Commission has opened four market investigations to further assess Microsoft’s and Apple’s submissions arguing that, despite meeting the thresholds, some of their core platform services do not qualify as gateways:
Microsoft: Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising Apple: iMessage
Under the DMA, these investigations aim to ascertain whether a sufficiently substantiated rebuttal presented by the companies, demonstrate that services in question should not be designated. The investigation should be completed within a maximum of 5 months.
I think the problem with M$ and especially Apple is that since their OSes are very popular their default Apps have a high install base. But since few people actually use them they don’t have the corresponding monthly active users. iMessage for example only serves as the SMS client for most people to receive stuff like shipping notifications or OTPs. I don’t think that will be enough to get them out of being designated Gatekeepers but it explains why their services are not yet decided on.
Add comment