Digital Markets Act (DMA)

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is the EU regulation governing the market power of 'gatekeepers' — the platforms business users cannot avoid. The European Commission designated the first gatekeepers (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft, later Booking) in September 2023, and their obligations applied in full from March 7, 2024. Unlike GDPR, which regulates everyone's data handling, the DMA regulates a named list's conduct — but its compliance ripples land on every marketer using those platforms.

The obligations that touch marketing: gatekeepers must obtain consent before combining personal data across their own services and with third-party data (the requirement behind CONSENT-MODE-V2's mandatory signals and Meta's EU consent flows — platform compliance passed through as advertiser homework); they must not self-preference their own services in rankings; they owe business users data access and advertisers/publishers transparency on ad pricing and performance metrics; messaging interoperability and choice screens open closed ecosystems at the edges; and app-store steering rules loosen the gardens' tollgates. For marketers the practical surface is concrete. EEA measurement and audience features now run through consent signaling — unconsented EEA users vanish from remarketing and granular measurement, with CONVERSION-MODELING filling the gaps. Ad-transparency rights formally entitle advertisers to better pricing and verification data than the gardens historically volunteered (worth requesting, not just admiring). Choice screens and steering shifts move some traffic acquisition battlegrounds — default-search and app-distribution assumptions baked into channel plans deserve periodic re-checks as enforcement proceeds. And enforcement is live, not theoretical: the Commission opened non-compliance proceedings against several gatekeepers within weeks of the deadline, and the first fines arrived in 2025 — the rules are being litigated into shape, which means the downstream requirements keep moving.

The DMA matters to any marketer with EEA audiences, because gatekeeper compliance becomes advertiser plumbing — consent signals, changed defaults, modeled data where observation used to be. It matters strategically to anyone whose distribution depends on a gatekeeper's choices: search defaults, app stores, and feed algorithms are now partially regulated terrain. The discipline is downstream vigilance: wire the consent infrastructure properly, claim the transparency data the law entitles you to, and re-check platform-dependent assumptions each time enforcement reshapes a gatekeeper's behavior. (General information, not legal advice.)

The DMA entered into force in November 2022 as the EU's answer to platform market power — the Commission designated the first six gatekeepers in September 2023, full obligations applied March 7, 2024, and non-compliance proceedings began within weeks, making it the fastest-moving layer of the EU's digital rulebook alongside its sibling, the Digital Services Act.

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