The Commission’s verdict on its own flagship platform law has landed awkwardly with the legislators who built it. On 28 April the executive published its first formal review of the Digital Markets Act and declared the regulation “fit for purpose,” crediting two years of enforcement with measurable gains for business users, developers and consumers. Within days, the European Parliament’s lead voices on the file responded with a sharper grade. Andreas Schwab, the EPP rapporteur who steered the DMA through Parliament, told colleagues that “digital markets evolve rapidly, and the framework should not be seen as static, in particular with regards to AI and cloud.” That gap, between an executive content with the architecture and a legislature impatient with its enforcement, is the political subplot of the May antitrust agenda.
The Commission’s report, COM(2026) 178, presents a defensive case. Competition chief Teresa Ribera, who took over the digital file in late 2024, has argued that the DMA’s structural remedies are working precisely because they are slow, predictable and procedurally tight. Article 53 obliges a review every three years; the first one therefore lands with limited evidence, since most of the seven designated gatekeepers only crossed the compliance threshold in March 2024. Within that constrained sample, the executive lists concrete deliverables: alternative app stores live on iOS, sideloading available in the EEA, choice screens for browsers and search defaults, and an enforcement docket of more than sixty open or closed proceedings reported by Cullen International in January.
Parliament’s complaint is not that the law is broken; it is that the law is being enforced quietly. A 5 May hearing at the JURI and IMCO committees catalogued the same friction points the Commission acknowledged in its own review: gatekeeper compliance reports judged “too vague” by smaller market participants, an opaque decision-making record, and visible tensions between the DMA and parallel obligations under the GDPR and the Cyber Resilience Act. Coverage from EU Perspectives this week described a Parliament that has shifted from co-author to enforcement watchdog. Schwab’s call for AI and cloud to be folded into a faster amendment cycle puts a near-term political deadline on the Commission’s preferred three-year rhythm.
The Big Tech bill itself remains substantial. European antitrust action against the largest platforms produced €3.77 billion in fines across 2025, according to figures compiled by EU Perspectives in January. May has added procedural extensions — Google, in particular, received additional time to address concerns linked to an ongoing investigation — which Ribera has defended as “discreet” handling consistent with due process. Parliament’s counter-reading is that discreet handling and political accountability sit poorly together when external pressure, including from Washington, is openly framed as a test of the EU’s willingness to enforce.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the Commission is unlikely to reopen the DMA’s substantive scope in 2026, but it now faces growing pressure to publish more granular enforcement data and to clarify the interaction between DMA, AI Act and data protection obligations, the same friction Brussels-based compliance teams have flagged for a year. Second, the political cost of a quiet enforcement strategy is rising. If gatekeeper behaviour does not visibly change before the next Article 53 review window, the case for legislative reopening, driven by Parliament rather than the executive, will move from rhetorical to procedural.
For the wider competition portfolio, the May review establishes a working principle that is likely to outlast the current College: in the DMA file, the Commission gets to define the law’s design, but Parliament increasingly defines its perceived success.
