Companies must meet three prerequisites to be considered as “gatekeepers”:
have a significant weight in Europe: this is the case if the company has achieved an annual turnover in the European Economic Area of at least 7.5 billion euros in each of the last three financial years, for asia mobile number list example, and it provides an essential platform service in at least three Member States,
control a major access point for user businesses to reach end consumers: more than 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EU and an average of more than 10,000 professionals per year,
have a strong and sustainable position: this is assumed to be the case if the company has met the previous criteria for three years.
On 6 September 2023, the European Commission designated six companies:
Alphabet (Google, Chrome, Android, Youtube)
Amazon
Apple (iOS, Safari, App Store)
ByteDance (TikTok)
Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger)
Microsoft (Windows, LinkedIn)
Following their designation, access controllers have six months to comply with all the obligations set out in the DMA and provide a compliance report indicating the solutions implemented to comply with it.
Concretely, what does this change for access controllers?
The regulation imposes around twenty obligations and prohibitions . Access controllers must in particular:
allow users to easily unsubscribe and uninstall services, software and applications ,
do not impose default software on the operating system installation,
enable major messaging services to be interoperable with others.
On the other hand, they can no longer :
preinstall certain software applications ,
promote their own products or services on their platforms over other sellers,
reuse personal data collected during a service for the purposes of another service , without the user's effective consent having been given,
require app developers to use certain services to be listed in app stores.