The EU General Court annuls the EU's designation of Meta's Marketplace as a DMA gatekeeper, citing partial evidence, but upholds the designation for Messenger
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta challenged the original DMA designations for Messenger and Marketplace in 2023. The Commission later said Marketplace should no longer be designated after citing its 2024 business-user level, while keeping the broader dispute over the initial designation alive.
Marketplace has also faced a separate Commission antitrust investigation concerning its connection to Facebook and its trading terms. The court outcome therefore narrows one regulatory route without disposing of the other.
First-order effects
- Marketplace’s DMA gatekeeper designation is annulled, removing that designation’s service-specific obligations and enforcement exposure for Meta.
- Messenger remains a DMA-designated core service, preserving Meta’s compliance obligations for that product despite the partial court win.
Second-order effects
- The ruling reinforces that the Commission must substantiate designations at the level of each named service; platforms contesting similar decisions gain a clearer basis to scrutinize the evidence.
- Meta’s Marketplace regulatory risk shifts relatively more toward the separate antitrust case, where the alleged Facebook tie and trading terms are evaluated under a different legal framework.
Third-order effects
- DMA enforcement is likely to become more service-specific and evidentiary contested rather than treating a company’s scale as sufficient across all of its products.
- The split result points toward a layered EU approach in which DMA obligations and traditional antitrust cases can proceed independently, leaving platforms to manage overlapping but non-interchangeable regimes.
The trend: EU digital-platform oversight is evolving into a more granular, product-by-product system in which gatekeeper status and antitrust liability are tested on separate legal and factual records.