Clifford Chance

The European Commission (Commission) has designated six businesses as "gatekeepers" under the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), in respect of 22 different "core platform services" that they provide. This follows the earlier designation of the same businesses, plus a number of others, under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which is now fully applicable to those businesses.

On 6 September 2023, the Commission designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft - under the DMA, the EU's new legislative regime that aims to ensure fair and contestable digital markets. In total, 22 core platform services provided by gatekeepers have been designated (see the table below).

In April 2023, the same businesses, plus a number of others, were also designated under the Digital Service Act (DSA) as "Very Large Online Platforms" (VLOP) and/or "Very Large Online Search Engines" (VLOSE). The DSA is a separate, but complementary, EU regime that aims to protect users of digital services and to combat the provision of illegal content, products and services.

Businesses designated under both the DMA and the DSA

In addition, the following businesses have been designated as VLOPs under the DSA only: Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, Pinterest, Snapchat, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Zalando. Amazon and Zalando have appealed against their VLOP designations to the EU's General Court.

The Commission also made a number of decisions not to designate certain services under the DMA, or to investigate further whether to designate them. While Alphabet's Gmail, Microsoft's Outlook.com and Samsung's Internet Browser met the quantitative thresholds for designation, the Commission concluded that it had received sufficient qualitative justifications to exclude their designation. The services that are subject to further investigation are Microsoft's Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising and Apple's iMessage and iPadOS. These investigations will take up to 5 months (or 12 in the case of iPadOS, since it did not meet the quantitative thresholds for designation).

The six gatekeepers will now have six months to ensure compliance with the DMA obligations for each of their designated core platform services.

Those businesses designated as VLOPs and VLOSEs under the DSA have been required to comply with the DSA since 25 August 2023.

For more information on the obligations imposed by the DMA and the DSA on the businesses referred to above, see our briefings linked in the box to the right.