DMA

The Digital Markets Act sets conduct rules for the largest digital platforms, which the European Commission designates as gatekeepers. Among its obligations are limits on how gatekeepers combine personal data across their services without consent, and duties to give business users and end users access to data and to allow portability and interoperability.

Only designated gatekeepers are directly bound. For everyone else, the DMA matters as a source of rights in dealings with those platforms.

• Gatekeepers designated by the Commission for specific core platform services, such as online search, app stores, operating systems, browsers, social networks, messaging, video sharing, online advertising and marketplaces.
• Designation follows thresholds on EU turnover or market value, user numbers and entrenchment, or a market investigation.
• Business users and end users of those services benefit from the obligations.

End users can refuse consent to the combination of their personal data across a gatekeeper's services and still get a less personalized equivalent service, port their data, uninstall preinstalled apps and change defaults. Business users can access the data generated by their use of the platform and use alternative payment and distribution channels where the rules allow.

Fines of up to 10% of worldwide annual turnover, or up to 20% for repeated infringements, and periodic penalty payments (Arts. 30 and 31). For systematic non-compliance, the Commission can impose behavioral or structural remedies. It fined two gatekeepers in April 2025.

1. Check whether you are a gatekeeper; almost every organization is not.
2. If you are a business user of a gatekeeper, identify the data access, portability and interoperability rights you can use.
3. Review ad and measurement arrangements that depend on gatekeeper data combination, since consent now limits it.
4. Track Commission decisions on specification and non-compliance that change platform terms.