Digital Markets Act
In shortForces the largest platforms to keep their doors open. Using that is up to you.
The Digital Markets Act is not addressed to you but to seven designated companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Booking. Their core platform services carry obligations that did not exist before.
The three duties that are practically useful
Data portability. Business users and end users must be able to export their data effectively and continuously — on an ongoing basis, not as a one-off. That is the foundation of any migration that does not end in a screenshot marathon.
Access to generated data. If you sell or advertise through a platform, you get access to the data your own use generates. Previously that was often visible only in aggregate.
No self-preferencing, no tying. A gatekeeper may not favour its own services, and may not condition the use of one service on the use of another. That is the lever against exactly the bundling that makes switching unattractive.
What it is not
Not a sovereignty law. The DMA governs competition, not jurisdiction. A gatekeeper meeting every obligation still answers to the law of the country it is based in. See US CLOUD Act.
Why it is in the toolbox anyway
Because it lowers the price of leaving. Lock-in is not a question of possibility but of cost — and data portability is the single largest item in that sum. See Vendor lock-in.
In practice: if a designated gatekeeper tells you continuous data export is not technically supported, that has been a statement with legal weight since March 2024 — and the weight is not on your side of the table.