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The compliance deadline for the six tech giants regulated under the European Union\u2019s Digital Markets Act (DMA) expired yesterday. Which means Alphabet\/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance\/TikTok, Meta and Microsoft are now under active assessment by EU enforcers.<\/p>\n
The bloc will monitor whether they\u2019re abiding by DMA requirements to deal fairly with business users of their regulated core platform services and meeting other legal requirements in areas like data portability, platform interoperability and user choice. Failure to do so risks big fines \u2014 of up to 10% or even 20% of their global annual turnover.<\/p>\n
The first batch of gatekeeper compliance reports \u2014 aka the non-confidential versions \u2014 have been published on the Commission\u2019s DMA website<\/a>. (See below for links to the individual reports.)<\/p>\n These reports provide varying levels of detail on actions taken in response to the regulation so far. Apple\u2019s public-facing report is by far the briefest (just a 12-page summary, focused on changes to its App Store, iOS and Safari browser, though it\u2019s written in quite readable prose), whereas Microsoft has opted for multi-part reportage \u2014 dividing disclosures into a series of discrete documents, related to its two designated core platform services (Windows and LinkedIn).<\/p>\n While Apple uses the public report as another opportunity to rail against the EU\u2019s enforced changes to its \u201cintegrated, end-to-end system\u201d \u2014 warning of the DMA creating \u201cnew avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit and harmful content, and other privacy and security threats\u201d \u2014 Microsoft\u2019s reporting seems intended to be too boring for anyone to bother reading. As well as breaking it out into multiple downloads, its compliance disclosures are written in dry legal language and include redactions, suggesting it\u2019s opted to reproduce formal submissions to the Commission for this public-facing part of its DMA reporting obligations. The massive overall page toll is also notable.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, Amazon has produced the glossiest-looking report, packaging its DMA disclosures in a graphic wrapper of photos, charts and pull-quotes \u2014 for a distractingly \u2018easy to skim\u2019 business brochure vibe.<\/p>\n At over 200 pages, Google\u2019s report is long and extremely dense. It\u2019s also not very visually appealing as it\u2019s written in light grey text with extensively hyperlinked footnotes, as well as being augmented with screenshots, diagrams and box-outs. The length is at least justified: Reflecting the fact a full eight of its products are designated as core platform services.<\/p>\n Social networking giants Meta and ByteDance have fewer regulated services \u2014 so, unsurprisingly, their reports hit a middling length.<\/p>\n ByteDance\u2019s report reads like raw, redacted legalese, with no effort to polish anything. Whereas Meta has applied its usual thick PR gloss. It kicks off the report with a summary of how many employees (11,000) and engineering hours\/technical work (590,000) it claims to have applied to working on its DMA response. It also top-loads the document with heavy spin about \u201cnew and meaningful choices\u201d it claims it\u2019s offering European users in response to the law.<\/p>\n Pity the Commission enforcers whose job will require wading through all these disclosures \u2014 and wrangling a lot more information \u2014 to determine whether or not the tech giants are actually<\/em> DMA compliant.<\/p>\n For handy reference, we\u2019ve rounded up links to the gatekeepers\u2019 first batch of public-facing DMA compliance reports below.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for an analytic overview of the DMA<\/a>, its aims and early impacts, check out our earlier explainer.<\/p>\n Alphabet\/Google<\/a> (211 pages)<\/p>\n Amazon<\/a> (32 pages)<\/p>\n Apple<\/a> (12 pages)<\/p>\n ByteDance\/TikTok<\/a> (52 pages)<\/p>\n Meta<\/a> (57 pages)<\/p>\n Microsoft <\/strong>being Microsoft it\u00a0has split its non-confidential DMA compliance reporting into several discrete documents: Summary<\/a> (13 pages); Windows PC OS<\/a> (164 pages); LinkedIn<\/a> (244 pages) \u2014 making a total of 421 pages.<\/p>\n Additionally, Microsoft has published a further five<\/strong> documents disclosing audits of the consumer profiling techniques used in its core platform services (here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>), the latter two of which are written by the third party it engaged for the audits (Deloitte) \u2014 adding a further 104 pages to its reporting tally. Or 525 pages in total for this reporting round.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nLinks to gatekeeper DMA compliance reports:<\/h3>\n