In its judgment delivered on Wednesday 17 July (Case T-1077/23), the European General Court dismissed the action brought by ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) against the European Commission’s decision designating it as a ‘gatekeeper’ under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) (see EUROPE 13244/3).
The Chinese platform lodged a legal challenge last November, two months after it was appointed gatekeeper (see EUROPE 13294/10).
It considered that its position in Europe was overestimated, as it generated the majority of its sales in China and not in the EU, and defined itself as “one competitor among others, and not an incumbent operator”.
For the CJEU, this argument is inadmissible: “the Commission could rightly consider that ByteDance’s high market value on a global level, combined with the large number of TikTok users in the Union, reflected its financial capacity and its potential to monetise them”.
It also considers that the number of users of the platform, their level of engagement, their daily use of the application and its solid position on the European market justify the EU’s decision to appoint TikTok as a gatekeeper.
“The arguments put forward by ByteDance were not sufficiently substantiated to manifestly call into question the presumption that ByteDance had significant impact on the internal market, that TikTok was an important gateway enabling corporate users to reach their end users and that ByteDance enjoyed an entrenched and durable position”, the General Court stated in detail in its statement.
Last February, the EU General Court had already rejected TikTok’s request to suspend the Commission’s decision, without ruling on the merits (see EUROPE 13347/17).
Link to the judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/d29 (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)