Gatekeeping

Gatekeeping literally means “guarding the gate.” It refers to the power to decide who may pass through a gate and who may not. The term originally comes from media research: newspaper editorial teams chose which news items got printed and which did not. Today the word is used above all for large tech corporations. They control the pathways through which users and providers come together. Whoever controls these pathways has a say in which company succeeds and which remains invisible.

Why gatekeepers decide over success and failure

For a young company, a single gatekeeper can decide everything. Anyone developing an app almost inevitably has to bring it into Apple's or Google's stores. There is hardly any other way onto a smartphone. If the app is rejected, the product is practically dead. The gatekeeper thus wields power that reaches far beyond its own business.

Then there is the question of money. For a long time, Apple and Google charged up to 30 percent commission on sales made through their app stores. That is a very large share of revenue generated by someone else. Companies like Spotify and Epic Games have therefore fought for years in courts and before regulators. Their argument: a gatekeeper must not be allowed to charge whatever it wants for its position.

A second problem is fairness toward oneself. Many gatekeepers are simultaneously referee and player. Amazon runs a marketplace and sells its own products on it. Google runs a search engine and offers its own services on it. The suspicion arises naturally that a company’s own offerings are favored. This is exactly what is called self-preferencing, and it is under particular scrutiny in Europe.

What it actually takes to guard a gate

Gatekeeping does not work through bans, but through technical and economic control. Whoever builds a phone’s operating system determines how programs may be installed. Whoever runs the search engine determines the order of the results. Whoever controls the payment process sees every transaction and takes a cut. These control points are also called bottlenecks.

This is reinforced by so-called network effects. A service becomes more valuable to each user the more other people use it. A social network with three members is useless, one with three billion is nearly impossible to replace. That is why digital markets often consolidate into a few very large providers. Switching becomes unattractive for users, even if they are dissatisfied.

Such bottlenecks are also emerging right now in artificial intelligence. Powerful models require special chips, large data centers, and huge amounts of data. Only a few companies worldwide possess all of this. Anyone who lacks access to these resources can barely keep up in development. This is gatekeeping at a level that users never get to see directly.

The Digital Markets Act and other headlines

The term has appeared especially often in business news since 2023. The reason is the Digital Markets Act, a European law for digital markets. It officially classifies particularly large platforms as gatekeepers. These include, among others, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and ByteDance. Stricter rules apply to them than to all other companies.

In practice, this means, for example: in Europe, iPhones must also be able to run third-party app stores. Messaging services are supposed to be able to connect with one another. And search engines are no longer allowed to systematically push their own services to the top. Violations can be punished with fines of up to ten percent of worldwide annual revenue.

In everyday life you encounter gatekeeping constantly, usually without noticing. It is embedded in the order of your Instagram feed, in the videos YouTube suggests to you, and in the question of which app you can even install. A common mistake is to equate gatekeeping with censorship. Censorship deliberately suppresses content, usually political. Gatekeeping is broader: it is about access, visibility, and market power, and often it is not a human being but an algorithm that decides.