Sources: EU is considering creating a new directorate headed by two top antitrust officials, amid concerns EU competition watchdog may struggle to enforce DMA
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
The DMA did not appear from nowhere: the EU's €600K gatekeeping study on remedying the power of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, and its push for cross-border data interoperability rules, were the legislative groundwork. With the law on the books, Reuters now reports the enforcement side is the weak point — sources say DG COMP may struggle to police the DMA and is weighing a new directorate run by two top antitrust officials.
The concern is not hypothetical: the EU is already preparing to charge Google under the DMA and is expected to open a DMA investigation into Amazon's marketplace self-preferencing. The reported restructuring echoes the EU's earlier move to reorganize privacy regulators around cross-border cases — Brussels fixing enforcement capacity after the rules are written, not before.
First-order effects
- DG COMP's DMA enforcement would get a dedicated unit led by two of its most senior antitrust officials, concentrating gatekeeper cases — Google's search results, Amazon's marketplace — under one command structure instead of spreading them across the directorate's general caseload.
Second-order effects
- Gatekeepers facing DMA probes would confront faster case assembly and more consistent remedies, raising the cost of the compliance-first-negotiate-later strategy Google has already tried with its search-result changes.
- The move signals to national competition authorities and other regulators that Brussels treats enforcement staffing as a first-class policy lever, inviting parallel capacity-building elsewhere in the EU's digital rulebook.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — rules first, then institutional reinforcement, as with privacy and now competition — the EU is building a permanent administrative apparatus for policing digital markets, one whose leadership choices (like Anthony Whelan's appointment and his pledge to press Big Tech investigations despite US political pressure) become as consequential as the statutes themselves.
The trend: The EU is shifting digital-market regulation from lawmaking to enforcement, repeatedly restructuring its institutions — competition, privacy — to give its rules operational teeth.