DMA Gatekeeper Compliance: What Changed in 2026

The DMA’s First Full Year of Enforcement

The Digital Markets Act entered full enforcement in March 2024, designating six companies as gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. More than two years later, the results are visible across the European digital landscape. Some gatekeepers have complied in substance. Others have complied only in letter, prompting the European Commission to open non-compliance proceedings and issue substantial fines.

The DMA is the EU’s most ambitious attempt to reshape digital markets, and 2026 has been the year where its practical impact became undeniable.

What the Gatekeepers Were Required to Do

The DMA imposed a series of concrete obligations on designated gatekeepers across their core platform services:

Interoperability: Messaging platforms must open their protocols to third-party services. Meta began enabling cross-platform messaging between WhatsApp and third-party chat applications in late 2025, though the implementation has been criticized for its limited scope and complexity for smaller providers.

Sideloading and alternative app stores: Apple was required to allow sideloading of apps and alternative app stores on iOS within the EU. The company complied by introducing alternative marketplace support, though the associated fees and technical restrictions prompted the Commission to investigate whether the compliance was genuine or designed to discourage adoption.

Data portability: Gatekeepers must provide effective tools for users to export their data and switch to competing services. Google’s data export tools have expanded significantly, though the usability and completeness of exports vary by service.

Self-preferencing prohibition: Search engines, marketplaces, and app stores cannot systematically rank their own products above competitors. Google Shopping and Google Maps results in EU search have been visibly restructured, with rival services receiving more prominent placement.

No cross-service data combination: Gatekeepers cannot combine personal data across their different services without explicit user consent. Meta’s practice of merging data across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for advertising purposes has been directly curtailed in the EU.

Enforcement Actions and Fines

The Commission has not been hesitant to use its enforcement powers. Multiple non-compliance proceedings have been opened, focusing primarily on Apple’s app store practices and Meta’s “pay or consent” advertising model. The first DMA fines were issued in 2025, with penalties reaching into the hundreds of millions of euros.

The DMA allows fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover for non-compliance, rising to 20% for repeat infringements. These thresholds give the regulation genuine deterrent power — for a company like Apple, a 10% fine could exceed USD 30 billion.

The Market Impact

Beyond compliance proceedings, the DMA is reshaping competitive dynamics in measurable ways. Alternative app stores on iOS, while still niche, have gained traction among European users. Browser choice screens — required when users set up new devices — have driven meaningful shifts in browser market share within the EU, with Firefox and smaller European browsers seeing increased adoption.

The data portability requirements have enabled a new category of services built around helping users migrate between platforms. European startups building interoperability tools, alternative marketplaces, and data migration services have attracted significant venture funding, directly benefiting from the market opening the DMA created.

For European alternative services featured on this site, the DMA is a structural tailwind. When Apple must allow alternative app stores, when Google must stop self-preferencing, and when Meta must stop combining data across services, the playing field tilts toward smaller, privacy-respecting European competitors that previously could not break through gatekeeper lock-in.

What Comes Next

The Commission is evaluating additional gatekeeper designations, with Booking.com and X (formerly Twitter) among the platforms under assessment. The interoperability obligations for messaging are set to expand in scope, eventually requiring group messaging and file-sharing compatibility across platforms.

Perhaps most significantly, the DMA is inspiring similar legislation globally. Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and the United Kingdom have all introduced or proposed digital markets legislation modeled on the DMA framework. Europe’s approach — regulating market structure rather than individual harms — is becoming the global template for digital competition policy.

The DMA is proof that regulation can reshape digital markets when backed by political will and meaningful enforcement. For European businesses and consumers, 2026 is the year those changes became tangible.