X evades compliance with landmark EU antitrust regulation

“X met the quantitative thresholds in term of user numbers and in term of turnover, however it doesn’t act as a gatekeeper between business user and end users,” a Commission spokesperson said.

Under the DMA, big platforms are designated gatekeepers when they have 45 millions end users and 10,000 business users, with a turnover of €7.5 billions in Europe each of the last three financial years, and when they act as a gateway between businesses and consumers.

If they meet the criterion, the gatekeepers must respect some obligations to ensure fair competition with other businesses and freedom of choice to European consumers in the product and services they can access. For instance, the gatekeepers are not able to favour their services and products by ranking them higher than those offered by other businesses on their platform. They must also allow users to uninstall preinstalled software or apps. 

Gatekeepers risk fines as much as 10% of their annual global turnover if they are found in breach of the DMA.

The European Commission had opened an investigation in May into Elon Musk’s social media, after X said it was not an important gateway between businesses and consumers.

The Digital Market Act came into force in 2023. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok owner ByteDance and Booking.com have already been designated gatekeepers by the European Commission.

After being designated gatekeeper, Apple was the first company, in June, to fall foul of the DMA, with the EU enforcer saying its App Store violated the DMA because it did not let third-party developers inform customers of purchasing possibilities outside Apple’s ecosystem.

Apple, Meta, and ByteDance have lodged appeals before the EU general court against their qualification as “gatekeepers”. Last July, a first ruling was delivered by European judges confirming the Commission’s decision to designate social media platform Tik Tok as a gatekeeper. ByteDance has lodged an appeal with the Court of Justice of the EU to overturn the general court’s ruling.