Sometimes the most important thing about a gatekeeper case is that there was no gatekeeper after all. That is the quiet lesson of the European Union General Court’s judgment in Meta Platforms v. Commission, which annulled in part the European Commission’s decision to designate Meta as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The ruling is narrow. It concerns only Facebook Marketplace, and it turns largely on procedural rather than substantive grounds. But narrow rulings can still cast long shadows, and this one does. The court’s reasoning reaches beyond Marketplace to questions that will shape future DMA enforcement.
This post argues that the decision’s greatest importance lies not in what it says about Facebook Marketplace, but in what it signals for the DMA’s future application. After outlining the case’s background, it explores three implications: for qualitative gatekeeper designations, for the DMA’s “gateway” logic, and for the wisdom of applying the DMA to challengers rather than incumbents.
When Process Becomes Substance
The DMA applies only to “core platform services” designated as “gatekeepers.” A gatekeeper is a platform that exerts a significant impact on the European Union internal market, serves as an important gateway between businesses and end users, and enjoys an entrenched market position. The statute presumes these criteria are satisfied when a platform meets certain quantitative thresholds, such as turnover, market capitalization, and the number of business and end users. If those thresholds are not met, the European Commission must establish gatekeeper status through a qualitative assessment.
The General Court’s judgment caps three years of DMA proceedings concerning Facebook Marketplace. In 2023, shortly after the DMA took effect, the Commission designated several Meta services—including Marketplace—as gatekeepers.
A gatekeeper designation is not necessarily permanent, however. In 2024, Meta asked the Commission to reconsider Marketplace’s designation. It pointed to three changes designed to alter Marketplace’s role as a gateway between businesses and end users. Most importantly, Meta limited Marketplace to transactions between end users, excluding businesses from the platform. It also removed indications that businesses could use the service and stepped up enforcement of its terms. As a result, the number of users operating as businesses remained minimal and fell below the DMA’s quantitative thresholds.
In light of those changes, the Commission repealed Marketplace’s gatekeeper designation in 2025. Meta nevertheless continued to seek annulment of the original designation because repeal alone did not restore it to the position it occupied before the Commission’s decision. In particular, Meta argued that the Commission should have considered the Marketplace changes during the original designation process, which might have led it not to designate the service at all.
The General Court agreed. By annulling the decision, the court confirmed—with ex tunc effect—that the designation was unlawful because of the temporal scope of the evidence the Commission considered. Put simply, the judgment clarifies that a qualitative gatekeeper designation must be based on the facts and circumstances that exist at the time of designation. That differs from designations based on the DMA’s quantitative presumptions, which rely on data from the preceding three years.
To borrow a phrase from James Venit, the judgment comes close to providing a “procedural answer to a substantive question.” Formally, the court annulled the Commission’s decision because it failed to provide adequate reasons and thereby prevented effective judicial review of the evidence presented by the parties. Even so, the ruling has potentially significant implications for the future direction of DMA enforcement. The next section highlights three of them.
When Gatekeepers Aren’t Gateways
First, the judgment will shape the ongoing DMA investigations into cloud services. The European Commission is currently investigating whether certain cloud providers—especially Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure—should be designated as gatekeepers under the DMA. If those services fall short of the DMA’s quantitative thresholds, the Commission will have to rely on a qualitative assessment.
That is where the General Court’s judgment matters. The court made clear that qualitative designations are not tethered to data from the preceding three years. They must reflect the facts as they stand at the moment of designation. In any future cloud designation, the Commission’s treatment of ongoing market developments will therefore face close judicial scrutiny.
Second, the judgment supports the view that cloud services sit uneasily with the DMA’s regulatory logic. The DMA was designed for platforms that operate as “gateways” between businesses and end users. Marketplace’s gatekeeper designation was reversed precisely because Meta eliminated the possibility that businesses could operate there as business users. The Commission therefore concluded that “Marketplace should no longer be considered as an important gateway for business users to reach end users.”
It is similarly difficult to describe cloud services as gateways in the DMA’s sense. They intermediate much like cable providers do: they provide infrastructure, but they do not typically connect business users to end users in the way the DMA contemplates. Read in this light, the General Court’s insistence that a gatekeeper must intermediate between businesses and end users sets a standard the Commission may struggle to satisfy for cloud.
Third, and finally, comes the policy question: What did this judgment—and the Commission decisions that preceded it—actually achieve?
In practice, Facebook Marketplace’s gatekeeper designation was reversed only after Meta removed the feature that made Marketplace a competitive presence on the business-user side. Once businesses could no longer operate on the platform, whatever competitive pressure Marketplace exerted on stronger marketplaces disappeared. The DMA proceeding thus likely made online marketplaces less contestable, not more.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated episode. The DMA tends to keep titans in quarantine. But the most effective competitive constraint on a large firm often comes from another firm of comparable scale. Yet DMA enforcement has once again taken aim at challengers rather than incumbents. TikTok was the first casualty in this campaign. Marketplace appears to be the latest.
Similar outcomes can be avoided. The DMA is the law of the land, but the Commission retains meaningful administrative discretion in how it enforces the statute. It should wield that discretion with a clearer account of enforcement’s intended and unintended consequences.
That does not require giving challengers to larger firms carte blanche. When the DMA is a poor fit as a matter of enforcement policy, competition law can fill the gap more surgically—just as the Commission did against Facebook Marketplace in 2024.
The Cost of Keeping Titans in Quarantine
The real significance of Meta Platforms v. Commission may lie less in Facebook Marketplace than in what it signals for future DMA enforcement. By insisting that qualitative designations rest on the facts as they stand at the moment of designation, and that gatekeepers genuinely function as gateways between businesses and end users, the General Court has raised the bar for the cloud designations now on the horizon.
The broader lesson concerns enforcement strategy. The DMA’s tendency to keep titans in quarantine risks blunting the very competitive pressures it was designed to protect, particularly when enforcement falls on challengers rather than incumbents. The law may be settled, but its application remains a matter of choice. As the Marketplace saga illustrates, today’s enforcement decision can become tomorrow’s lost competitive constraint.
