The EU’s Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is a competition law that forces a small group of the world’s largest tech platforms — currently Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and ByteDance — to open their services to rivals and stop favoring their own products. Unlike traditional antitrust law, which punishes bad behavior after the fact, the DMA sets rules upfront for how these “gatekeeper” companies must operate inside the EU.
What Counts as a Gatekeeper
Not every tech company falls under the DMA — only ones that meet strict size thresholds. A company qualifies as a gatekeeper if it runs a “core platform service” (an app store, search engine, social network, or operating system, for example), has annual turnover of at least €7.5 billion in the European Economic Area or a market valuation of at least €75 billion, and reaches more than 45 million monthly users and 10,000 business users in the EU for three years running.
The European Commission — the EU’s executive body — first designated six gatekeepers in September 2023: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta, and Microsoft, covering 22 platform services between them, from Google Search and Android to Amazon Marketplace and WhatsApp.
What Gatekeepers Have to Do
The DMA spells out specific obligations. Gatekeepers must let users uninstall pre-installed apps, allow businesses to strike deals with customers outside the platform without penalty, make it possible to move data to a competing service, and give rivals fair access to the technical features their own apps use. They’re barred from ranking their own products above competitors’ in search results, from combining personal data across their different services without explicit consent, and from blocking app developers who want to steer users toward cheaper deals outside the app store.
The point isn’t to punish these companies for being big — it’s to stop their size from locking out smaller competitors before they get a chance to compete.
Enforcement and Fines
The European Commission can fine a gatekeeper up to 10% of its worldwide annual turnover for breaking the rules, rising to 20% for repeat violations. That’s not theoretical: in April 2025, the Commission fined Apple €500 million for restricting how apps could direct users to cheaper deals outside the App Store, and fined Meta €200 million over a subscription model it ruled didn’t give users a genuine choice about data use.
Beyond fines, the Commission can also issue binding “specification” decisions that tell a gatekeeper exactly how to comply when its own interpretation of the rules falls short — the tool it used against Google in July 2026, ordering the company to open Android’s voice-assistant and app-integration features to competing AI assistants and to start sharing anonymized Search data with rival search engines and AI chatbots.
How It Differs From the EU AI Act
The DMA is easy to confuse with the EU AI Act, but the two solve different problems. The AI Act is a safety and risk law: it sets rules for how AI systems must be built and used, regardless of which company makes them. The DMA is a competition law: it targets a handful of the largest platforms, AI-related or not, to keep digital markets open to new entrants. A company can be squarely inside DMA obligations — like Google — while a much smaller AI startup with no gatekeeper status is never touched by it at all.
In the news
The Commission’s July 2026 order for Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and share Search data with competitors is one of the most consequential DMA actions to date — read our coverage of the decision for what it changes for users and competing AI assistants.