What you need to know
- The EU Commission has listed six companies as designated gatekeepers under the new Digital Markets Act, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft.
- A total of 22 core platform services provided by the six gatekeepers, including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s employment-focused social network platform, LinkedIn, and more, will be affected.
- Despite meeting the set thresholds, Gmail, Outlook.com, and Samsung Internet Browser didn’t qualify as gateways following compelling submissions by their parent companies.
- The six gatekeepers have six months to comply with the DMA’s rules.
- The EU has opened four market investigations looking into Bing, Edge, Microsoft Advertising, and Apple’s iMessage, citing that despite meeting the set thresholds, some of these core services don’t qualify as gateways.
We recently reported on Microsoft and Apple being on the fence about their services, Bing and iMessage being in the spotlight, and potentially being incorporated into the EU’s gatekeeper list under the EU’s new Digital Markets Act.
Both entities argued that their services weren’t big enough to be considered gatekeepers, further citing that their services didn’t meet the set threshold. However, the EU’s gatekeepers list has since been released, listing Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft.
As outlined by the EU Commission under the DMA, which has been in effect since November 2022, a gatekeeper is essentially an online platform that provides an important gateway between business users and consumers. As such, it can leverage its position in the digital space to create a bottleneck.The DMA is in place to prevent gatekeepers from imposing unfair practices on businesses and end users while simultaneously “ensuring the openness of important digital services.” As such, the legislation will require gatekeepers to share data, link to competitors, and ensure their services are interoperable.
The move will affect 22…
read more www.windowscentral.com
