The EU’s Big Tech law was meant to move fast. It hasn’t.
BRUSSELS — When the EU’s Digital Markets Act pried open Apple’s iPhone ecosystem in 2024, Aptoide walked in. The Lisbon-based developer launched its own app store with fees below Apple’s standard cut, hoping to lure apps away from the iPhone maker.
“It had a lot of promise,” said its CEO Paulo Trezentos.
Two years later, that promise has started to sour. Apple’s conditions continue to make the DMA-enabled setup an unattractive way to run a business, Trezentos said in an interview. For others, it’s worse: In January, one of Aptoide’s few competitors, SetApp Mobile, shut up shop, citing “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit.”
As the EU’s landmark Big Tech market power regulation enters its third year and faces a mandatory European Commission review, a growing chorus of voices are raising concerns that the tool — pitched as a way to fast-track enforcement in quick-moving digital markets — is too slow and unwieldy.
“We were promised the DMA would give us more certainty and more speed. We have neither at present,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management who specializes in digital antitrust policy.
“We are seeing the Commission move at a brisk pace in some areas. In others, the regulatory dialogue seems to have no end,” Scott Morton added.
Big Tech’s challengers point to factors ranging from a lack of staff in Brussels to strategies by gatekeepers that delay enforcement. The Silicon Valley firms themselves see speed as less of an issue, but lament the uncertainty of the process.
Both are grappling with another dynamic: The intensely politicized enforcement cases handled by the Commission have become entangled in the bloc’s already difficult trading relationship with the United States. The Trump administration wants the EU to roll back its digital rules, which it says discriminate against U.S. companies.
‘Massive under-enforcement’
No firm has felt the brunt of the EU’s new digital rulebook more than Google — the target of non-compliance probes into four of its eight services that are designated under the DMA, from Search to YouTube to the Google Play Store.
The most contentious of those cases concerns the search engine’s results page, one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the internet.
For the ecosystem of companies that depend on its traffic, from comparison shopping sites to hotel and airline booking sites, the Commission’s non-compliance probe — which is still running — has been far too slow.
“There is massive under-enforcement,” Björn Borrmann, head of legal and public policy at GetYourGuide, a Berlin scaleup that spends hundreds of millions of euros a year to showcase holiday tours and activities via Google Search, told POLITICO’s recent AI & Tech Week.
The investigation concerns the DMA’s stipulation that Google not favor its own services — like Google Flights — to the detriment of rival services, like Booking.com or Expedia.
The Commission opened the probe just weeks before the DMA took effect in 2024, claiming the firm’s initial attempt to make its key property compliant had fallen short.
In that case, the Commission blew past a suggested one-year timeline for an investigation. “It should have been decided a year ago,” Borrmann said.
Compared with traditional EU antitrust investigations — the 2017 Google Shopping case took seven years, for example — the DMA’s pace is breakneck.
Litigation risk
The risk of litigation is top of mind for Teresa Ribera’s competition department, which is mindful of the courts’ scrutiny of past antitrust decisions. That has led at times to a cautious approach that drags out proceedings, said a Commission official who was granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.
It doesn’t help that the Commission’s DMA enforcement team consists of just 100 staffers spread across two directorates.
“They work day and night,” said Simonetta Vezzoso, a professor specializing in competition policy at the University of Trento, adding that the teams have “limited bandwidth.”
For Google, the Commission’s promise of a more collaborative, less adversarial approach has not led to a lighter regulatory burden.
“Complying with the DMA is a heavy, ongoing process involving hundreds of technical meetings with the Commission,” Oliver Bethell, its global head of competition compliance, said on a recent podcast.
Over the past two years, the firm has held hundreds of meetings with the Commission and third parties as it road-tested half a dozen proposals intended to comply with the rules.
The search giant’s consultations are no more than a “time-delaying tactic,” said Guillaume Teissoniere, general counsel for travel booking group eDreams Odigeo.
“They’re always trying to find a landing zone. You will never be able to find that. What I want is that Google complies,” Teissoniere told POLITICO.
Google’s proposals for sought-after slots on its search page have sparked divisions between hotels and airlines on one side, and aggregator sites like Expedia that compete with Google’s travel booking websites on the other.
“It’s divide and conquer,” Teissoniere said.
The Commission’s efforts to find an inclusive solution, and the uproar from European hotels and airlines fearful of losing exposure, have delayed the non-compliance cases, the Commission official said.
Even those cases completed on time — in its first DMA decisions the Commission slapped Apple with a €500 million fine and Meta with a €200 million fine in April 2025 — did not fully resolve the disputes.
“We’re still waiting for clarity,” said Trezentos of Aptoide. The Portuguese developer says while he’s happy about last year’s Commission decision on Apple, a lack of clarity on the iPhone maker’s revised attempts to comply has created uncertainty for firms like his.
That lingering uncertainty may be a structural feature of the regulation itself.
“Much of the implementation has been window dressing — gatekeepers cosmetically comply with the provisions, and then it’s on the Commission to respond, with limited resources and the need to prioritize,” said Alba Ribera Martínez, a competition law lecturer at Spain’s Villanueva University.
“The DMA is not outcomes-based — the Commission says that again and again,” she said. “Gatekeepers are not obliged to do anything more than create the circumstances for business users. The question is whether the law has to deliver business opportunities, or only create them.”
Trade barriers
The most contentious delays, however, have been geopolitical, with the Commission’s enforcement of the regulation getting caught up in the tumultuous transatlantic trade relationship.
Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission delayed a set of decisions last year as it sought to avoid penalizing a U.S. firm while negotiating a trade truce with the Trump administration.
That dynamic has flared up again as the Commission sought to finalize the overdue Google Search probe. The executive had been on track to issue a decision and fine in March, but this has been put on pause.
“A decision is coming,” competition chief Ribera said in response to a question from POLITICO at a recent event.
Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the DMA’s one-year deadline for non-compliance probes “is not a hard legal deadline” but a “best-endeavor” benchmark that accommodates dialogue with gatekeepers and the fact-finding needed on technically complex compliance questions.
“Simply issuing a fine formalizes the infringement without solving the issue at hand,” he said. Google’s proposed remedy “is simply not strong enough, so we’re giving Google a bit more time to keep engaging — but we will also not wait for ages.”
Concerns over a delay led more than two dozen civil society groups to write to von der Leyen warning that the Commission’s credibility would be on the line should it allow “political interference” to shape its DMA decision-making.
Borrmann of GetYourGuide fears that weak enforcement could encourage gatekeepers to “conquer other markets” like AI — a threat that the European Parliament recognized in a resolution last month that called on the Commission to engage in “effective, timely and consistent enforcement.”
The EU’s “deliberate tiptoeing around the White House” risks impairing its legitimacy, by announcing a law “but not having the means, the people, the ambition to enforce,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch former MEP who is now a nonresident fellow at Stanford.
“Antitrust was once admired because it was not so politicized — that era is over.”
