Apple has failed in its legal challenge to the European Union’s classification of the company as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, with the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg ruling on July 8 that the European Commission was correct in its 2023 designation of Apple’s App Store and iOS operating system as core platform services subject to the law’s competition requirements.
The ruling is a significant setback for Apple’s effort to limit the scope of European digital market regulation applied to its ecosystem, and it confirms that the DMA’s obligations will continue to govern how Apple must conduct itself in European markets.
What the DMA requires and what gatekeeper status means
The Digital Markets Act was introduced by the European Union to address the competition dynamics of large technology platforms that occupy dominant positions in digital markets. Companies designated as gatekeepers under the law are required to follow a set of obligations designed to make their platforms more open to rivals, give users more meaningful choices, and prevent the gatekeepers from using their positions to entrench themselves at the expense of competing businesses and services.
Designation as a gatekeeper carries ongoing compliance requirements that can require significant changes to how a company operates its platforms in European markets, including requirements around interoperability, data sharing, and access for third-party developers and service providers.
The argument Apple made and why the court rejected it
legal strategy centered on the argument that its App Store cannot properly be treated as a single platform service because the stores serving different Apple devices, phones, tablets, computers, watches, and television devices, are functionally separate given the different hardware they support.
The General Court rejected that framing. The judges found that regardless of the hardware differences between Apple’s device categories, all of its App Stores perform the same essential function: distributing applications to users on Apple platforms. That common essential function was sufficient in the court’s view to treat them as a single core platform service for the purpose of the gatekeeper designation, regardless of the device-level distinctions Apple emphasized.
also attempted to challenge a provision of the DMA related to interoperability obligations as part of the same case. The court rejected that challenge on procedural grounds, finding that the interoperability provision was not the legal basis for Apple’s gatekeeper designation and therefore could not be challenged in this particular proceeding.
Broader DMA enforcement context
The ruling arrives against the backdrop of ongoing DMA enforcement action against Apple and other designated gatekeepers. Last year the European Commission found that Apple, along with another major technology company, had failed to comply with parts of the DMA related to giving consumers meaningful choices about services that use less of their personal data. Those compliance failures are separate from the gatekeeper designation challenge that the court ruled on this week, but they illustrate the sustained regulatory pressure facing in the European market.
one of a small group of companies that the European Commission has designated as gatekeepers, a list that includes other large American technology platforms whose scale and market position meet the DMA’s thresholds. The law’s ambition is to reshape the competitive dynamics of digital markets that have historically been dominated by a small number of global platforms, and the court’s ruling in Apple’s case confirms that the Commission’s authority to impose that designation was properly exercised.
Apple has the option to appeal the General Court ruling to the EU’s highest court. The company had not publicly commented on the ruling at the time of reporting
