Sources: the EU plans to exempt Microsoft's Bing, Edge, and Advertising services from the DMA, as an EU probe tentatively concluded they're not dominant enough
- EU probe comes ahead of March roll-out of Digital Markets Act — Apple's iMessage service is already expected to be exempt
Context & Ripple Effects
The tentative finding follows Microsoft’s and Apple’s arguments that Bing and iMessage lacked the user reach needed for gatekeeper treatment, and an EU evidence-gathering process that included questionnaires to customers and competitors.
It puts Microsoft’s services alongside iMessage in a designation process built around demonstrated market power rather than a company’s overall scale. The later closure of the related investigation reinforces the importance of service-level assessments.
First-order effects
- Bing, Edge, and Microsoft’s advertising service would avoid DMA obligations if the tentative conclusion is formalized, while Microsoft’s other activities are not automatically covered by this finding.
- The decision gives Microsoft a favorable regulatory outcome for the named services ahead of the DMA rollout; iMessage was on a parallel path toward exclusion.
Second-order effects
- The result gives providers seeking exemptions a concrete precedent: they can contest designation by arguing that a specific service lacks sufficient market power, as Apple and Microsoft had previously argued for iMessage and Bing.
- EU enforcement attention can concentrate more heavily on services that are designated gatekeepers, rather than being spread across every product offered by the largest technology companies.
Third-order effects
- If this service-by-service approach persists, DMA enforcement will function less as blanket regulation of large firms and more as a contested classification system centered on each service’s market position.
- That makes the quality of evidence from users, customers, and rivals a durable part of platform regulation, while leaving outcomes vulnerable to changes in a service’s reach or role.
The trend: The DMA is developing into interface-neutral platform governance in which obligations attach to demonstrable service-level gatekeeping power, not corporate size alone.