What the DMA is — the law that lets Europe order Google to open Android

Competition law has an old weakness. It is too slow.

Investigating whether a dominant firm behaved anti-competitively, defining the market, hearing the defence, imposing a fine and having it confirmed on appeal typically takes five to ten years. The market hardens long before that. By the time the penalty lands, the competitor it was meant to protect is usually gone.

The EU's Digital Markets Act is an attempt to remove that lag. Instead of punishing conduct, it mandates it in advance.

1. From ex-post penalties to ex-ante obligations

The decisive change is the burden of proof. Under conventional antitrust the regulator has to establish that a practice harmed competition, and that is the step that consumes years. Under the DMA that argument disappears; the only question is whether a designated firm met its obligations.

The same design is the basis of the criticism against it. Because obligations attach to scale rather than to proven harm, firms argue the net is cast too wide.

2. Gatekeepers — who gets designated

The DMA does not regulate all platforms, only those designated as gatekeepers. Designation broadly turns on three tests:

• Scale — EU revenue and market capitalisation above thresholds
• Core platform service — search, app store, operating system, messenger, social network, advertising, browser
• Gateway position — a user base large enough that other businesses must pass through it to reach consumers

The third test is the name. The law regulates the keeper, not the gate.

Obligations divide into things a gatekeeper must do and things it must not.

3. July 2026: two orders for Google

On July 16, 2026 the European Commission adopted two binding specification decisions addressed to Alphabet. These did not find a new infringement; they spell out how existing DMA obligations must be met.

① Android — eleven capabilities opened to rival AI assistants

Today, effectively only Google's Gemini can operate at system level on Android. Rival assistants are confined to the sandbox of an ordinary app. The Commission specified the capabilities that must be opened, which fall into four layers.

The deadline is August 1, 2027 at the latest, implemented in the next major Android release. The measures include safeguards for privacy, security and device integrity.

② Search data sharing

Anonymised Google Search ranking, query, click and view data must be made available to competing search engines and AI firms on FRAND terms — fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory — from January 2027. The Commission says the anonymisation uses a multi-layered method developed with privacy specialists and aligned with draft joint guidance on the DMA-GDPR interface.

The second measure may matter more than the first. Search quality compounds from accumulated user-behaviour data, and there has been no realistic path for a challenger to accumulate it. Data sharing aims directly at that moat.

4. Why it matters outside Europe

Legally it does not apply. The DMA governs EU users, and these measures are written for them. An Android user in Seoul or Chicago does not automatically gain the ability to set a third-party system assistant in 2027.

Two spillover channels are nonetheless real:

• Technical — maintaining divergent code per region is expensive. Once an access architecture exists, shipping it everywhere is often cheaper. Apple's USB-C transition is the standard reference
• Regulatory — other authorities cite EU decisions. "It works in Europe" is a strong argument in a negotiation

The reason this decision is worth watching for anyone building AI products is narrower and more specific: it is the first time access to the device has been treated as a competition question. Distribution, not only model quality, decides who reaches users — and regulation has now said so out loud.

5. What remains unverified

The eleven capabilities are specified in detail in Commission documents; the four-layer grouping here is a summary. How much actually opens depends on the technical specification read against Google's implementation plan.

The status of any objection or appeal by Google is unconfirmed. Gatekeepers can challenge specification decisions in court, and if that happens the stated deadlines become a separate question.

Spillover is inference. The USB-C precedent exists, but assistant access is entangled with security and privacy arguments that charging cables never were, so the same path is not assured.

One thing settles it: what actually opens on August 1, 2027. Regulation set a date. Whether what arrives is substantive access or formal compliance only becomes visible then.