Sources: EU regulators send out questionnaires asking customers and competitors whether Apple's iMessage and Microsoft's Bing should be regulated under the DMA
EU antitrust regulators are asking Microsoft's (MSFT.O) users and rivals whether Bing should comply with new tough tech rules …
Context & Ripple Effects
The questionnaires followed Apple and Microsoft’s argument that iMessage and Bing were not popular enough to qualify as gatekeepers. The inquiry puts third-party evidence, rather than company claims alone, at the center of the designation decision.
The case became an early test of service-level DMA enforcement: regulators later leaned toward excluding iMessage on the basis of its limited business-user importance, before closing the broader investigation without designating the services.
First-order effects
- Customers, rivals, and other market participants gain a formal channel to document how iMessage and Bing affect competition and user choice.
- Apple and Microsoft face continued uncertainty over whether these individual services will be subject to DMA obligations, despite their position that the services lack sufficient reach.
Second-order effects
- Competitors can use the consultation to argue that practical dependence or ecosystem effects matter alongside raw popularity, shaping the evidentiary record for designation.
- The process makes a service’s distinct market role—not simply its owner’s scale—the immediate focus for compliance planning by large platforms.
Third-order effects
- If this service-by-service approach persists, DMA scope will be determined through more granular tests of business dependence and market power rather than assumed across every product offered by a major platform.
- That can create a durable distinction between regulating a company’s core gatekeeper services and exempting adjacent products that do not independently meet the threshold.
The trend: EU platform regulation is moving toward evidence-led, product-level assessments of whether particular digital services function as gatekeepers.