The Digital Markets Act offers the European Commission more power to regulate tech giants, which critics say were given too much leeway.
Observers say the law could open a new battlefront between digital titans and the European Union as some companies, such as Apple, are reportedly preparing legal challenges. The EU in July named seven companies — Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Facebook umbrella Meta, Microsoft and Samsung — who had self-declared revenue and user figures big enough to be classed as “gatekeepers”.
The EU believes past examples of this are Facebook’s buyouts of Instagram and WhatsApp as well as Google’s purchase of YouTube and Waze.