The legal architecture of the Digital Markets Act faced its first serious courtroom test this week, and the verdict left neither the regulator nor the regulated able to claim a clean win. On 3 June the General Court annulled, in part, the European Commission’s 2023 decision designating Meta as a gatekeeper, striking the label as it applied to Facebook Marketplace while upholding the very same designation for Messenger. The judgment, delivered by the Eighth Chamber sitting as five judges, is the clearest signal yet that the bloc’s marquee competition tool will be policed line by line rather than waved through.
What stands out is how narrow the reasoning was. The court did not rule that Marketplace falls outside the law’s reach on the merits. It found instead that the Commission had simply failed to explain itself, concluding that the decision did not satisfy the requirements in terms of reasoning and had not taken account of recent developments in the service. In plain terms, the regulator lost on process, not principle. The designation was declared unlawful with effect from the moment it was taken, because the evidence the Commission leaned on did not reflect the facts as they stood at the time.
That distinction matters more than the headline suggests. A gatekeeper designation triggers a cascade of obligations, from interoperability duties to bans on self-preferencing, and the threat of fines reaching ten percent of global turnover. If those duties can be unwound because the underlying analysis was thin or dated, every future designation becomes a richer target for litigation. Companies now have a template: attack the quality of the reasoning and the currency of the data, rather than the substance of the policy.
The practical fallout for Meta is modest. The Commission had already quietly removed Marketplace from its gatekeeper list in April 2025, after the company adjusted the platform so that it no longer met the business-user thresholds that trigger designation. The annulment therefore tidies up a question that had, in commercial terms, already resolved itself. Messenger, by contrast, remains squarely inside the regime, a reminder that the court was willing to back the regulator where the file was solid.
For the Commission, the loss is reputational rather than operational, but reputations shape leverage. Officials have built the credibility of the Digital Markets Act on the idea that designation is swift, evidence-led and hard to dislodge. A finding that one of its earliest calls was inadequately reasoned hands defence lawyers a narrative they will repeat across the open cases involving Apple, Alphabet and Amazon. Expect future decisions to arrive thicker, more cautious and more explicitly tied to contemporaneous market data.
There is a deeper tension here about how a fast-moving regulator handles fast-moving markets. The court effectively told the Commission that it cannot freeze a service in time, designate it, and ignore the way the product has since changed. That is a reasonable demand for legal certainty, yet it sits awkwardly with an enforcement model built for speed. If platforms can mutate their way out of thresholds faster than the paperwork can keep pace, the gatekeeper concept risks becoming a moving target that the law struggles to pin down.
The ruling will not slow the broader rollout of the digital rulebook, and the Commission retains the option to appeal on points of law. But it sharpens the central question facing Europe’s competition enforcers: can a regime designed to move quickly survive the slow, exacting scrutiny of the courts? This week’s answer was a qualified yes, with conditions attached.
