Gatekeeper

A gatekeeper is, in the literal sense, someone who guards a gate. In the digital economy, the term refers to a very large company that is almost impossible to bypass. Anyone who wants to sell a mobile app can practically not get around the two big app stores of Apple and Google. Anyone who wants to be found online has a hard time getting around the search engine Google. These companies thus have a say in who reaches customers at all. Since 2023, Gatekeeper has also been an official legal title in the European Union, carrying clear obligations.

Why the EU treats gatekeepers separately

Ordinary competition law works backwards. An authority spends years examining whether a company has abused its market power, and only afterwards imposes a penalty. In digital markets this is often too late. By the time proceedings end, the competitor has long since gone bankrupt or been bought up.

Digital markets also tend to tip easily toward a single winner. A messenger app is only useful if your friends use it too. A shopping portal attracts merchants because that’s where the buyers are, and buyers because that’s where the merchants are. This effect is called the network effect. It ensures that the biggest player keeps getting bigger, even if a competitor has the better product.

That is why the EU passed the Digital Markets Act in 2022, DMA for short. This is a law that prescribes rules of conduct for certain corporations from the outset. It does not wait for the harm to occur but seeks to prevent it. Violations can cost up to ten percent of worldwide annual revenue, and up to twenty percent for repeat offenses.

How a company gets the status

The EU Commission designates gatekeepers based on fixed figures. A company must have at least 45 million active users per month in Europe and at least 10,000 business users, meaning merchants or app providers. On top of that comes an economic threshold for revenue or market capitalization. Anyone who reaches these values for three years automatically qualifies as a gatekeeper and must report accordingly.

The status does not attach to the corporation as a whole but to individual services. The law calls them core platform services: search engines, app stores, social networks, messengers, browsers, operating systems, advertising networks, and a few others. A corporation can thus appear on the list with five services and not with others. Those designated so far include, among others, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, ByteDance, and Booking.

Concrete obligations and prohibitions follow from the status. A gatekeeper may not favor its own offerings in its result lists. It must allow users to delete pre-installed programs. It may not merge data from different services without consent. And it must grant competitors access, for example to payment functions or alternative app stores.

What changes on the phone as a result

The consequences are directly visible in Europe. Since 2024, apps from third-party stores can be installed on iPhones, which was previously impossible. When an Android phone is first started, a selection screen for the search engine appears. Google Maps no longer automatically appears at the very top of Google search results but competes with other map services.

In business news, the term usually comes up in disputes. The Commission opens proceedings because it believes a rule has been violated, and the companies sue against it. Apple and Meta received the first fines under the DMA in 2025. Such reports move stock prices because they affect entire business models.

A common misconception is that gatekeeper is simply another word for monopoly. That is not correct. A company can be a gatekeeper and still face fierce competition, for example Apple against Google. What matters is not market share alone, but the role as an unavoidable point of access between companies and their customers. Outside the EU, incidentally, the title does not apply, even though other countries are now examining similar laws.