Digital Markets Act

What Is the Digital Markets Act?

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a landmark European Union regulation that entered into force in November 2022 and became fully applicable in March 2024. It establishes a set of ex ante obligations on large digital platforms designated as "gatekeepers" — companies that control critical access points between businesses and consumers in digital markets. As of 2024, six companies have been designated as gatekeepers: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. The DMA targets Core Platform Services (CPS) such as operating systems, app stores, online search engines, social networking, messaging, advertising, and web browsers. Penalties for non-compliance can reach up to 10% of a gatekeeper's global annual turnover, or 20% for repeat offenses, with daily fines of 5% of average worldwide daily turnover for sustained violations. The regulation represents one of the most aggressive interventions in digital platform economics since the rise of the modern internet and is closely watched as a model for platform regulation worldwide.

Dismantling Walled Gardens and Enabling Interoperability

The DMA's most transformative provisions directly challenge the walled garden business models that have dominated mobile ecosystems. Gatekeepers operating app stores must now allow rival app marketplaces on their operating systems, enable sideloading of applications, and permit alternative in-app payment processing systems. Apple, which had long maintained exclusive control over iOS app distribution, began enabling third-party app stores and alternative payment methods in the EU in 2024. By 2026, Apple transitioned to a unified business model in the EU, replacing its controversial Core Technology Fee with a Commission on Transaction for Commerce on digital goods. The DMA also mandates messaging interoperability — requiring dominant messaging platforms to open up to third-party services — and obliges gatekeepers to allow users to choose their default browser, search engine, and virtual assistant upon device setup. These provisions are designed to reduce switching costs and lower the barriers to entry that reinforce network effects favoring incumbents.

Implications for Gaming and the Creator Economy

For the gaming industry, the DMA is reshaping the economics of mobile distribution. Game developers in the EU can now distribute titles through alternative app stores, bypassing the 15–30% commission historically charged by Apple and Google. Developers are also permitted to inform users about offers, pricing, and content available outside the app — a practice Apple had previously restricted. This has significant implications for free-to-play and live-service business models, where in-app purchase revenue is central. The ability to route payments through alternative channels could meaningfully shift the economics of virtual economies and virtual item marketplaces. For the broader creator economy, the DMA's data portability and interoperability requirements could enable more open platform models where creators retain greater control over their audiences and revenue streams, rather than remaining locked into a single ecosystem.

AI, Data, and the Expanding Scope of the DMA

A critical open question is whether artificial intelligence services — particularly generative AI — will be brought under the DMA's scope. As of 2025, AI is not classified as a Core Platform Service, but the European Commission launched a public consultation in mid-2025 specifically examining AI's relationship to the DMA framework. The DMA High-Level Group issued a public statement on AI, and stakeholders have urged the Commission to consider how gatekeeper platforms leverage their vast proprietary data reserves to build AI models, potentially compounding existing market dominance. The intersection of the DMA with the EU AI Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) forms a layered regulatory framework that may reshape how AI systems are trained, deployed, and monetized — particularly those embedded in search, advertising, and platform recommendation engines. The data-sharing obligations in the DMA could also affect how AI training datasets are constructed, given restrictions on gatekeepers combining user data across services without explicit consent.

Enforcement Actions and Global Influence

The European Commission has moved aggressively on enforcement. By mid-2024, preliminary findings of potential DMA breaches were issued against Apple (for App Store steering restrictions), Meta (for its advertising consent model), and Alphabet (for practices in Google Play and Search). These cases signal that the Commission intends the DMA to function as a proactive, structural intervention — not merely a reactive enforcement tool. The DMA's influence extends well beyond Europe: jurisdictions including Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States are studying or enacting similar platform regulation, while India and Brazil have introduced proposals modeled on the gatekeeper framework. For companies building in spatial computing, virtual worlds, and the broader metaverse, the DMA establishes important precedents for how platform access, data portability, and interoperability will be governed as new immersive computing paradigms emerge. The regulation's requirement for interoperable, contestable digital markets could accelerate the development of more open ecosystems — or, critics argue, fragment user experiences and undermine platform investment in quality and security.