The compliance deadline for the six tech giants regulated by the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) expired yesterday. Which means that Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance/TikTok, Meta and Microsoft are now under active evaluation by EU authorities.
The bloc will monitor whether they comply with the DMA's requirements to deal fairly with commercial users of their regulated core platform services and whether they comply with other legal requirements in areas such as data portability, platform interoperability and choice of user. If they do not do so, they risk receiving large fines, up to 10% or even 20% of their global annual turnover.
The first batch of Guardian compliance reports, also known as non-confidential versions, were posted on the website. Commission DMA website. (See below for links to individual reports.)
These reports provide varying levels of detail on the actions taken in response to the regulation so far. Apple's public report is by far the shortest (just a 12-page summary, focused on changes to its App Store, iOS and the Safari browser, although it's written in fairly readable prose), while Microsoft has opted for a multi-part report. dividing the disclosures into a series of discrete documents, related to its two designated core platform services (Windows and LinkedIn).
While Apple uses the public report as another opportunity to criticize changes imposed by the EU to its “end-to-end integrated system,” warning that the DMA creates “new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit content and harmful, and other threats to privacy and security”: Microsoft's reports seem intended to be too boring for anyone to bother reading. In addition to breaking it up into multiple downloads, its compliance disclosures are written in dry, legal language. include redactions, suggesting that it chose to reproduce formal submissions to the Commission for this public part of its reporting obligations to the DMA. The huge number of total pages is also notable.
Elsewhere, Amazon has produced the most brilliant report, packaging its DMA disclosures in a graphic wrapper of photographs, charts and quotes, for a distracting, “easy to flip through” business brochure vibe.
At more than 200 pages, Google's report is long and extremely dense. It's also not very visually appealing, as it is written in light gray text with heavily hyperlinked footnotes, as well as being expanded with screenshots, diagrams, and boxes. The extension is at least justified: it reflects the fact that eight of its products are designated as core platform services.
Social media giants Meta and ByteDance have fewer regulated services, so their reports are unsurprisingly medium in length.
ByteDance's report reads like crude, worded legal jargon, with no effort to polish anything. While Meta has applied its usual thick PR gloss. She begins the report with a summary of how many employees (11,000) and engineering/technical work hours (590,000) she claims to have applied to work on her DMA response. It also fills the document with strong spin on “significant new options” it claims to offer European users in response to the law.
Pity the Commission's enforcers, whose job will require sifting through all of these revelations (and discussing a lot more information) to determine whether they are tech giants or not. in fact DMA compliant.
As a useful reference, we've put together links to the first batch of public DMA compliance reports from the Guardians below.
If you are looking for an analytical overview of the WFD, its objectives and its early impacts, see our explanation above.
Links to gatekeeper DMA compliance reports:
Alphabet/Google (211 pages)
Amazon (32 pages)
Apple (12 pages)
ByteDance/TikTok (52 pages)
Goal (57 pages)
microsoft Being Microsoft, it has split its non-confidential DMA compliance reports into several discrete documents: Summary (13 pages); Windows operating system for PC (164 pages); LinkedIn (244 pages), making a total of 421 pages.
Additionally, Microsoft has published more five documents revealing audits of consumer profiling techniques used in its core platform services (here, here, here, here and here), the last two written by the third party he hired for the audits (Deloitte), adding 104 more pages to his report count. Or 525 pages total for this round of reporting.
