On Tuesday 4 July, the European Commission announced that Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft and Samsung had notified it of their intention to be designated as ‘gatekeepers’ under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) (see EUROPE 13195/29).
Companies had to submit their applications by 3 July. The European Commission will now be responsible for examining their dossiers and by 6 September, will be able to appoint them as gatekeepers. These companies will then have 6 months to comply with the DMA rules.
Stricter rules will then be imposed on them, including a ban on deciding which applications are pre-installed on devices, which application shop should be used, or even listing and treating their own products in a more favourable manner. Messaging services, for their part, will have to be interoperable (see EUROPE 12919/12).
As a reminder, companies must meet a number of criteria to qualify as ‘gatekeepers’ under the DMA, including having a turnover greater than €7.5 billion over the last three financial years, or being valued at a minimum of €75 billion over the last financial year, and having more than 45 million active end users per month and more than 10,000 annual active business users within the EU. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)