Sources: EU is initiating a €600K tender for a study on the gatekeeping power of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple and ways to remedy it
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters : Tweets: @danielollecto Tweets: Daniel Oll / @danielollecto : “The Commission's directorate-general for communications and technology expects an interim report in three months and a final report in five months” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The tender lands mid-stream in a busy 2020 for Brussels: in January the Commission was already preparing data interoperability rules aimed at building a single market in data against big tech's dominance, and this €600K study is the evidence-gathering leg of the same effort. The Commission's communications directorate expects an interim report in three months and a final one in five — a timeline built to feed directly into rulemaking.
The arc that follows confirms the study was groundwork: by October the EU was reported to be compiling a hit list of up to 20 large internet companies for tougher rules, and the gatekeeper framing here is exactly the vocabulary that later anchored formal DMA investigations into Apple, Google, and Meta over app-store steering and ad-data practices.
First-order effects
- Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple become the documented subjects of an official Commission study, with an interim report due in three months — their market power is about to be codified in the Commission's own evidence base.
- The Commission's communications directorate gains a five-month clock to produce a final report, compressing the gap between analysis and legislative proposal.
Second-order effects
- The study gives the Commission the evidentiary scaffold for the ex-ante rulemaking it pursued next — the reported hit list of up to 20 internet companies and, downstream, formal DMA investigations into Apple, Google, and Meta.
- A Brussels-authored definition of 'gatekeeping power' becomes a template other regulators can cite, raising the compliance cost of the same conduct across jurisdictions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the EU's approach shifts from case-by-case antitrust — fines like the one later reported against Google over Search self-preferencing — toward standing ex-ante obligations for designated gatekeepers, with commissioned studies as the routine first step of that machinery.
- The four firms named here end up regulated as a class rather than as individual defendants, a structural change that determines how any future platform — European or American — can monetize data and distribution.
The trend: The EU is building a standing ex-ante regulatory regime for platform gatekeepers, using commissioned studies and hit lists to convert competition concerns into codified obligations.