Are big tech companies beyond enforcement?

A few years now after the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act (DMCCA) have passed, regulators are beginning to challenge the behaviour of tech giants. But tech giants are pushing back — raising an important question: are they too large for legislation?

In both the EU and UK, competition authorities have started trying to implement and enforce new remedies. Yet progress has been generally slow, involving multiple market studies, consultations and rounds of evidence. This blog explores the ideas behind digital competition enforcement, why such efforts remain so hard and whether regulation is needed at all.

What are regulators trying to address?

It’s widely recognised that a handful of firms dominate the digital ecosystem. And applying traditional competition law to these companies has been challenging, for three main reasons:

1. These dominant firms provide not just products but essential infrastructure. Entire economic sectors rely on their cloud computing or operating systems, including public services, financial institutions and businesses of every size.
2. Network effects and data synergies reinforce their dominance. The scale of use of big-tech products — often interconnected across devices, advertising and services — makes their market position self-reinforcing. For instance, data collected from phones, browsers and ad networks can all be combined within a single-company ecosystem.
3. They operate vertically integrated ecosystems. Unlike traditional firms, big-tech companies often dominate across multiple layers: from hardware to app stores, browsers, advertising platforms and cloud services. This means their market power cannot be confined to a single market definition.

 EU and UK Approaches

Under the EU’s DMA, the European Commission has thus far designated six “gatekeepers”: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta and Microsoft. These firms must comply with a uniform set of obligations across their designated “core platform services”. While some designations were clear-cut (e.g., Google Search), others have required lengthier investigations. For example, the Commission reviewed whether Apple’s iMessage and Microsoft’s Bing, Edge and Advertising should qualify as gatekeepers — ultimately deciding they should not.

By contrast, the UK’s DMCCA uses a case-by-case approach undertaken by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has the power to designate companies with Strategic Market Status (SMS) for specific digital activities. So far this case-by-case approach has yielded two important conclusions:

• Google has been designated for its Search and Search Advertising features;
• Apple and Google have both been designated for their mobile ecosystems.

While the EU applies broad rules to all designated gatekeepers, the UK tailors rules to each activity. In both systems, the goal is similar: to make powerful digital firms adapt their business models to promote fairer competition with potential solutions, including by removing default-browser settings or enabling alternative app stores.

Why Has Enforcement Been So Hard?

Even where dominance is clear — Apple and Google together account for almost 100% of UK mobile devices — effective enforcement remains slow and uncertain. Several factors explain why.

Benefits of Big Tech

Is being big really bad? Tech companies bring significant benefits to both economy and society. They not only provide employment and investment but also spearhead technological advances driving growth and innovation. For example, Google contributed £118 billion of UK economic activity in 2023, driven by products like Google Search, Maps and Workspace. Similarly, these types of tech companies often offer alternative products such as digital-skills programmes, boosting productivity and employment.

Another key consideration is whether digital-markets regulation is really, after all, in the interest of consumers. Do consumers not actually benefit, for instance, from being able to access everything on one system and having all applications linked? Whilst from a competition perspective, a linked ecosystem is suboptimal, in reality, it could be the best outcome for consumers and points to a reduced need for competition regulation. One key metric for competition regulation is being able to evidence tangible harm — evidence increasingly hard to show given technology’s contributions to the economy and society.

Pace of regulation

Digital-market investigations are lengthy, often requiring years of consultation, evidence-gathering and analysis. By contrast, innovation moves quickly; by the time designations are made, evidence may already be outdated. For example, ByteDance disputed its gatekeeper status and inclusion in the EU’s DMA, arguing it doesn’t enjoy a market share comparable to other social-media giants. The company’s market relevance now, though, compared to 2022, when the initial review took place, is significantly greater. The rapid emergence of AI-driven products illustrates this lag: even sectors once considered stable, like online search, are being fundamentally disrupted by AI-powered tools. While Google arguably continues to dominate the search market, the foundations of that dominance are being challenged both by its own AI-driven features (Google Overview) as well as by Large Language Model (LLM) competitors offering conversational answers instead of traditional, clickable lists. This evolution also carries major implications for advertising, since fewer clicks on search links could undermine the business model search companies have long relied on.

Definitions and categories

In addition to complicating enforcement, the speed of technological innovation can also challenge the very definitions and categories around which legislation is based. Under the DMA, for instance, companies may be designated as gatekeepers in relation to their “core platform services”. Yet emerging technologies do not always fit neatly into these categories. AI-based tools, for example, may be embedded within existing services (e.g., search engines, messaging apps or social media) rather than being operated as standalone platforms, thereby making it harder for current definitions to capture them. And while the DMA’s categories are mainly designed for services with large end-user bases, cloud services are primarily business-to-business offerings, making their categorisation less straightforward.

Regulatory process

Digital-markets regimes have been developed over the last few years: via consultations, legislation and guidance. This means big-tech companies have been aware of — and involved in — regulations for years: projecting, and planning for, their likely impact. Google, for example, has tested multiple alternatives in the build-up to these regimes, including by removing third-party cookies and changing its search rankings. Some companies have delayed new-product or -feature releases in the EU, as with Apple Intelligence and Airpod Live Translation. This not only raises uncertainty for businesses and causes reduced investment in innovation, but potentially leads to worse outcomes for society if consumers cannot benefit from new market offerings.

Resources

Big tech’s money-making is no secret; and the regulatory regimes in both the EU and UK include a revenue threshold. This resource has two main implications: for one, tech giants’ considerable room to spend on legal advice, policy development, government affairs and lobbying; for another, their ability to fund and dispute investigations and legal challenges — and ultimately pay fines for infringement. In just one example, Apple is appealing a €500-million fine by the European Commission, from spring 2025 and following a years-long investigation, for non-compliance with the DMA’s anti-steering rule, which prevents restricting app developers’ directing users to external offers. With such dispute processes often lasting years, big companies may well sometimes conclude that it’s cheaper to pay than comply. All of this raises questions around the best use of money and resources, for both tech companies and regulators. If government is to commit to years’-long investigations, at considerable public expense, and with little tangible benefit to consumers: is it really worth it?

Politics

The UK government’s main goal is growth: via free and fair competition and effective consumer protection to drive innovation, increase productivity and encouraging investment. Earlier this year, innovation was added as a secondary objective to regulators, ensuring the latter consider the wider market impact of any action. Similarly, the most recent strategic steer to the CMA pushes the focus onto UK individuals and UK businesses, essentially softening potential investigations into US tech companies. The EU, for its part, has tried with the DMA to take a stand for European independence over its own digital rules — yet has equally found it hard to balance this push for sovereignty with the need for simplification and a more competitive Single Market (not to mention the goal of retaining US support for European security, discussed below).

International context

Most designated firms are US-based, creating conditions for legal and political friction. Since the legal regimes in question were established, we have seen increased pressure in both the UK and EU to bend to US wishes in exchange for securing ongoing support for Ukraine, reducing the impact of President Trump’s tariffs or benefiting from new investment opportunities. US Republicans, going back even before the 2024 US elections, have repeatedly raised European digital regulations — derided as discriminatory against Americans and against conservatives — as major irritants. Tech giants from China have also played an increasing role; the pending sale of TikTok USA has shown the extent to which politics can force changes to controversial regulations, and how countries may try to regulate firms associated with geopolitical rivals.

All these issues help explain challenges to enforcement. But they also beg the questions: how do governments regulate multinational companies big enough, or connected enough, to resist? Does competition enforcement ultimately benefit consumers, or just leave them worse off? Financial markets provide one potential metric of enforceability: Apple and Google’s share prices showed no significant drop when the CMA confirmed its SMS designation, suggesting intervention by regulators is not particularly concerning to the companies themselves and their investors.

Big tech’s global scale, wealth and reach across essential digital infrastructure have made enforcement slow, reactive and politically fraught. But these same factors also continue to offer a clear demonstration of the power and benefits of innovation technology. Perhaps big tech is not ‘‘beyond enforcement’’ — but regulators should pick their battles wisely.