A rare setback for the European Commission’s flagship technology rulebook arrived this week from Luxembourg, where the General Court annulled the decision that had branded Facebook Marketplace a “gatekeeper” service under the Digital Markets Act. The judgment, delivered on 3 June in case T-1078/23, marks the first time an EU court has unpicked one of the designations that anchor the bloc’s most ambitious effort to discipline the largest online platforms.
The ruling is best read as a procedural rebuke rather than a verdict on Marketplace itself. Judges did not declare that Meta’s classifieds service falls outside the law; they found that the Commission simply failed to make its case properly. Regulators, the court held, leaned on data drawn from the platform’s preceding three years of activity while ignoring changes Meta introduced to Marketplace during 2023. By resting the designation on a snapshot that no longer matched reality, the Commission deprived its own decision of an adequate evidentiary foundation.
In practice, the immediate consequences are modest. The Commission had already struck Marketplace from its gatekeeper list in April 2025, after adjustments by Meta meant the service no longer crossed the user thresholds that trigger designation. The company therefore wins a point of principle more than a fresh commercial advantage. Crucially, the court left untouched the designation of Messenger, the messaging app used by roughly a billion people. That status keeps Meta bound by the law’s interoperability duties, which require the company to open Messenger to competing services.
Yet the symbolism matters more than the arithmetic. The Digital Markets Act was sold as a faster, sturdier alternative to the years-long antitrust battles that defined the previous decade. Its gatekeeper designations were meant to be near-automatic once quantitative thresholds were met, sparing regulators the burden of proving market power case by case. A court now signalling that those designations still demand current, carefully reasoned evidence complicates that promise. Enforcement teams will have to keep their analysis up to date as platforms shift features, prices and business models, rather than relying on figures gathered at the moment of first scrutiny.
For the companies caught by the regime, the judgment offers a template. Each of the designated gatekeepers has every incentive to test whether the Commission’s reasoning rests on stale numbers or insufficient justification. The decision does not weaken the law’s substance, but it sharpens the procedural standards regulators must clear, and it confirms that the General Court intends to police those standards closely.
The Commission can appeal to the Court of Justice, and may yet decide the point is not worth contesting given that Marketplace already sits outside the gatekeeper net. Either way, the episode lands at an awkward moment. Officials have spent the past two years touting the Digital Markets Act as proof that Europe can regulate technology firms swiftly and survive the inevitable legal pushback. A partial loss, even a largely technical one, hands critics on both sides of the Atlantic a talking point about overreach and shaky reasoning.
The deeper lesson is about institutional discipline. Ambitious rules survive contact with the courts only when the administration applying them respects the evidentiary spirit, not merely the letter, of due process. The bloc’s regulators retain their powerful new toolkit. This ruling is a reminder that wielding it still requires showing their work.
