The European Commission has designated six of the largest tech companies on the planet

as the gatekeepers of online services.

You'll know these names, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, Facebook, parent Meta, Google

and YouTube parent Alphabet, and, maybe you're less familiar with this one, Bite Dance,

which owns TikTok.

They've all got until March to comply with the Continent New Digital Markets Act, or

the DMA, which aims to give users more choice.

For more, we asked Summit Sharma, the competition and antitrust senior researcher at Consumer

Reports, who started by explaining what the term gatekeeper refers to.

These largest online platforms, not only dominate the markets, they are the markets, and so

they set the rules for these markets, and what the DMA does is, it sets out do's and

don'ts for these companies.

For example, they cannot self-preference their own services, and would allow businesses

to contract directly with consumers, for example.

So based on your understanding of how the Digital Markets Act would work, do the remedies

that it lays out seem like they could work?

Yes.

My expectation is that over the next year or so, as the DMA is implemented by these various

companies that are enforced by the Commission, we will start seeing divergence and the kinds

of product and services that are available to European consumers versus US consumers.

So in effect, the law is already in, it's already in force, and there are certain provisions

which are contractual provisions.

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