The European Union has confirmed the first six tech gatekeepers that must follow the rules of its Digital Markets Act (DMA). The names of these companies should be pretty familiar: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
The DMA stipulates that gatekeepers can't favor their own services over rivals' offerings and can't keep users locked into their own ecosystems. They have to let third-party entities interoperate with their services in certain situations too. Of course, these incredibly rich companies aren’t going quietly: Microsoft and Apple have already argued that, despite meeting the thresholds the European Commission laid out, Bing, Edge, Microsoft Advertising and iMessage don't qualify as gateways and shouldn't have to comply with the new act.