EU court partially sides with Meta in a blow to the European Commission
The EU's General Court has annulled Facebook Marketplace's gatekeeper designation under the Digital Markets Act — but the ruling is largely procedural, as the Commission had already stripped the platform of that status a year earlier.
The General Court of the European Union annulled the European Commission's "gatekeeper" designation for Facebook Marketplace, finding that the EU executive failed to adequately justify the designation.
The court's ruling, issued on Wednesday in Luxembourg, annuls, in part, a September 2023 decision by the Commission designating Meta as a gatekeeper — a decision the Big Tech company challenged specifically regarding Messenger and Marketplace.
What does the decision mean?
In the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), "gatekeeping" refers to control over the entry point businesses must pass through to reach customers online.
For example, if you are a small business trying to sell second-hand goods online and Facebook Marketplace is so dominant that you effectively have to use it to reach your customers, then Meta is the gatekeeper. It controls the digital gate between you and your potential buyers, and can set the terms on which you pass through.
The DMA was designed to stop those gatekeepers from abusing that position.
The ruling is a significant setback for the European Commission, which has positioned its act as its flagship tool for reining in the power of Silicon Valley's biggest platforms.
The practical impact of the Marketplace annulment is, however, limited. The Commission had already removed Marketplace from its gatekeeper list in April 2025 after changes Meta made to the platform meant it no longer met the business user thresholds required for designation.
Wednesday's ruling is therefore largely due to errors in legal reasoning and analysis.
Having a core designation partially thrown out by the EU's own courts because of errors in the Commission's rather than because Marketplace was found not to be a gatekeeper will raise questions about the rigour of the Commission's initial assessments and its ability to withstand legal challenges from well-financed tech companies.
The European Commission did not consider new information about changes Meta made to Marketplace in 2023 in its initial decision, the court said, meaning it relied only on data from the site's past three years of operations.
The decision also did not contain a sufficiently concrete analysis of how Marketplace worked after those changes took effect, particularly whether businesses could offer goods and services to consumers on the site.
The court upheld the decision that Meta remains a "gatekeeper" platform through Messenger.
What happens now?
Under the DMA, gatekeeper designation triggers a raft of obligations that can fundamentally reshape how a platform operates — and non-compliance carries fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual turnover, rising to 20% for repeat offenders.
For Meta, which reported revenues of $164.5bn (€150bn) in 2024, that could mean penalties running into the tens of billions.
Meta has already felt the force of those rules. On 23 April 2025, the European Commission fined the company €200 million for breaching DMA obligations over its "consent or pay" model, which the Commission found did not give users a genuine choice over how their personal data was used.
Apple was fined €500 million on the same day for separate violations.
The court did not rule that Marketplace is not a gatekeeper — only that the Commission failed to make its case properly. Should the platform's user numbers recover, the Commission retains the power to redesignate it.
That distinction matters because it leaves the door open for a fresh attempt at a designation but also hands Meta's lawyers a detailed roadmap of exactly where the original decision fell short.
The survival of the Messenger designation is not a minor consolation. With around 1 billion users, Messenger is one of the world's most widely used communications platforms, and its gatekeeper status obliges Meta to make it interoperable with rival messaging services — a requirement that, in theory, could eventually allow users of WhatsApp, Signal or other apps to message Messenger contacts without switching platforms.
Euronews Next reached out to the European Commission and Meta but did not receive an immediate reply.
