Dublin: The Digital Markets Act was meant to be the instrument that finally disciplined the handful of platforms that sit astride the European economy, and for two years the Commission wielded it with confidence. On 3 June the bloc’s General Court delivered the first real puncture to that confidence, annulling the part of the 2023 decision that had designated Meta as a gatekeeper in respect of its Marketplace classified-ads service, while leaving the company’s obligations for the Messenger chat service untouched.
The split outcome is more instructive than a clean win for either side. The judges did not rule that Marketplace fell outside the logic of the Act. They held instead that the Commission had simply failed to explain itself, finding that the contested decision did not satisfy the requirements in terms of reasoning as regards Marketplace. It is a defeat on process rather than principle, the kind that stings a regulator precisely because it suggests the case might have been winnable had the paperwork been built with more care.
Underlying the reasoning is a distinction that will shape every future designation. The Act lets the Commission tag a platform either by applying quantitative presumptions, drawn from user numbers and turnover over the preceding three years, or by making a qualitative judgement based on the facts as they stand at the moment of designation. The court insisted that a qualitative designation must rest on the circumstances existing at that time, not on a looser narrative of market power, and it found the Commission’s account of Marketplace wanting against that stricter test. Regulators reading the judgment will understand that the discretionary route now carries a heavier evidential burden.
The practical consequences are modest, which is part of what makes the ruling a clean test of legal principle rather than commercial stakes. The Commission had already dropped Marketplace from its gatekeeper list in April 2025, after changes Meta made to the service meant it no longer cleared the business-user thresholds that trigger the quantitative presumption. The annulment therefore reaches back to settle a question about a designation that had, in commercial terms, already lapsed. Nobody’s marketplace listings change because of this judgment.
What does change is the climate around enforcement. The Commission has staked considerable political capital on the Act, presenting it as proof that Europe can set the rules for digital markets that others merely complain about. A reversal, even a narrow and procedural one, hands the targeted companies a template for resistance and signals to the courts that the bloc’s flagship digital law will be policed for rigour rather than waved through on the strength of its ambition. Every gatekeeper with a borderline service now has an incentive to litigate the reasoning behind its designation.
For Meta the win is real but bounded. Messenger remains inside the regime, with the court confirming that it is a number-independent interpersonal communications service distinct from the Facebook social network, and the company’s core obligations are undisturbed. The lesson the Commission will draw, if it is wise, is not that the Act is overreaching but that its decisions must be argued with the same care a court will later demand. Ambition wrote the law. Reasoning will decide whether it holds.
