{"id":134280,"date":"2026-07-08T07:40:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T07:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/dma-gains-firefox-6-million-eu-users-but-leaves-google-90-dominant\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T07:41:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T07:41:46","slug":"dma-gains-firefox-6-million-eu-users-but-leaves-google-90-dominant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/dma-gains-firefox-6-million-eu-users-but-leaves-google-90-dominant\/","title":{"rendered":"DMA gains Firefox 6 million EU users but leaves Google 90% dominant"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A College of Antwerp legislation professor yesterday revealed a working paper<\/a> concluding that the Digital Markets Act may help scale back the European Union’s dependence on overseas know-how suppliers, however solely in slim circumstances, and principally not those regulators had hoped for. Jan Blockx, an assistant professor on the College of Antwerp who additionally sits as an assessor within the decision-making physique of the Belgian Competitors Authority, posted the paper to the Social Science Analysis Community on June 29, 2026, with a final revision recorded on July 7, 2026. He announced it publicly on LinkedIn<\/a>, the place the submit drew 82 reactions inside roughly a day.<\/p>\n

The paper, titled “The DMA’s Contribution to EU Digital Sovereignty,” runs 17 pages and works by means of six of the ten core platform companies lined by the regulation. Its central discovering cuts towards a standard assumption in Brussels coverage circles: that forcing gatekeepers to open their platforms to competitors will mechanically strengthen Europe’s hand towards overseas digital dependency. Blockx argues that in most markets it is not going to, as a result of the businesses finest positioned to learn from new contestability guidelines are themselves American.<\/p>\n

What the paper really measures<\/h2>\n

Blockx defines digital sovereignty narrowly and explicitly, breaking from centuries of political principle on the time period. Citing sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin’s authentic formulation of sovereignty as absolute state energy, and the 1933 Montevideo Conference’s territorial definition of statehood, the paper argues that neither framework transfers cleanly to our on-line world. As a substitute, Blockx adopts a practical check: digital sovereignty is impeded every time an irreplaceable share of digital companies within the EU is managed by corporations answerable to a single overseas authorities. Sovereignty improves, on this definition, solely when a service class has a number of suppliers from completely different jurisdictions, in order that no single overseas state can lean on all of them directly.<\/p>\n

That framing issues as a result of it adjustments what counts as a win. Beneath a looser definition, any new entrant competing with Google or Meta would possibly appear like progress. Beneath Blockx’s check, a European shedding floor to Google solely to realize floor to Microsoft’s Bing adjustments nothing, as a result of the EU stays depending on American jurisdiction both approach.<\/p>\n

The paper opens with a real-world illustration of what dependency prices in follow. After Worldwide Felony Courtroom prosecutor Karim Khan requested arrest warrants in 2024 for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant, the Trump administration sanctioned Khan in early 2025. Microsoft, in response to the paper, subsequently cancelled Khan’s electronic mail handle, a call that hampered the courtroom’s work and was compounded by additional US sanctions on 9 ICC judges over the next months. By late 2025, the paper states, the ICC had switched away from Microsoft totally, transferring as an alternative to openDesk, open-source office software program developed by the German state-owned firm ZenDIS. The episode, Blockx writes, reveals how “dependency on non-EU digital companies can undermine the flexibility of the EU and its member states to implement their very own legal guidelines.”<\/p>\n

The size of the underlying dependency<\/h3>\n

The paper cites a 2022 estimate, drawn from a CERRE report by Paul Timmers, that the EU trusted overseas international locations for greater than 80 p.c of the digital merchandise, companies, infrastructure, and mental property used inside its borders. As of June 2026, in response to the paper, seven corporations maintain gatekeeper standing beneath the Digital Markets Act throughout 23 designated companies spanning eight of the regulation’s ten core platform service classes. All seven are headquartered exterior the EU: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta in the USA, and ByteDance, whose dad or mum is predicated within the Cayman Islands, in China.<\/p>\n

Six markets, six completely different outcomes<\/h2>\n

The paper’s most substantive contribution is its market-by-market walkthrough, testing whether or not the DMA’s contestability provisions are probably to assist European or diversified alternate options achieve floor, or whether or not they are going to principally profit different American corporations.<\/p>\n

Search: a 90 p.c share that data-sharing guidelines haven’t but touched<\/h3>\n

Alphabet is the only gatekeeper for on-line search engines like google and yahoo within the EU, with Google Search holding what the paper describes as a market share of round 90 p.c, a determine the European Fee’s personal decisional document helps.\u00a0Eighteen European industry groups pressed the Commission<\/a>\u00a0in March 2026 to subject a proper non-compliance resolution towards Alphabet, citing that very same dominant place. The Fee has since moved additional: it opened specification proceedings beneath Article 8(2) on January 27, 2026, in case DMA.100209, aimed toward clarifying how Alphabet should share rating, question, click on and examine information with rival search engines like google and yahoo beneath Article 6(11) of the DMA.\u00a0Those proceedings, and the pressure behind them<\/a>, sit on the centre of the paper’s search-market evaluation.<\/p>\n

Blockx quotes Ecosia’s public argument that information entry is “important” for the German search engine to enhance outcomes, with Ecosia stating it wants “to go from answering two-thirds of queries to 100%.” Ecosia and the French search engine Qwant have collectively based the European Search Perspective, a basis working towards a European search-ranking algorithm able to competing with Google.<\/p>\n

However the paper’s verdict on search is blunt: even when the data-sharing guidelines work as designed, they won’t meaningfully scale back EU dependence on American suppliers, as a result of the second-largest search engine in Europe will not be European. It’s Microsoft’s Bing. Microsoft itself, the paper notes, initially met the quantitative thresholds that might have triggered a gatekeeper presumption for its personal search engine, however rebutted that presumption in a Fee market investigation, arguing {that a} gatekeeper designation would make it more durable for Bing to problem Google’s place. DuckDuckGo, additionally American, outperforms each Ecosia and Qwant in European utilization. “Elevated contestability of the place of Google Search will subsequently not be adequate to scale back the EU’s dependency on US suppliers for search companies,” the paper concludes.<\/p>\n

Social networking: three gatekeepers, three completely different international locations, one weak spot<\/h3>\n

Three corporations maintain gatekeeper standing for on-line social networking: Meta for Fb and Instagram, Microsoft for LinkedIn, and ByteDance for TikTok. As a result of these three usually are not all headquartered in the identical jurisdiction, the paper credit this market with a built-in sovereignty benefit that the majority different DMA-covered classes lack. Fb and Instagram every had 250 million EU customers as of 2022, in response to the ByteDance gatekeeper designation resolution cited within the paper, with TikTok at 125 million. Microsoft has reported a mean of 55 million logged-in LinkedIn customers month-to-month within the first half of 2025, alongside 213 million logged-out website visits.<\/p>\n

But the paper finds little room for real alternate options to develop. Open-source choices exist: Bluesky, constructed on the AT Protocol, had near 45 million registered customers as of June 1, 2026, and Mastodon, working on ActivityPub, had near 10 million. Each are described within the paper as “small fry” subsequent to the incumbents. The subsequent tier of alternate options past the 4 gatekeeping companies is totally American too: Pinterest at 124 million EU customers, Twitter\/X at 115 million, and Snapchat at 104 million, drawn from Digital Providers Act disclosure information. X itself met the DMA’s gatekeeper thresholds however efficiently rebutted the presumption in a Fee investigation. The paper additionally notes that the DMA accommodates no interoperability mandate for social networking companies, not like its requirement for messaging apps, and that the Fee’s first three-yearly evaluation concluded it could be untimely so as to add one.<\/p>\n

Video: a 97 p.c attain that dwarfs its nearest rival<\/h3>\n

Alphabet is the one gatekeeper for video-sharing platforms, owing to YouTube. In accordance with info Alphabet itself disclosed in 2024, YouTube reaches 433.8 million distinct consumer accounts within the EU month-to-month, a determine the paper factors out represents roughly 97 p.c of the complete EU inhabitants. Dailymotion, based mostly in France and essentially the most important various platform, reported fewer than 45 million energetic EU customers month-to-month as of 2026, beneath 10 p.c of the inhabitants. The paper’s evaluation is that even a extremely efficient DMA would wish to work terribly exhausting to make a significant dent ready that lopsided, and that the platforms almost definitely to soak up any misplaced YouTube visitors are TikTok, Fb, Instagram and LinkedIn, not Dailymotion.<\/p>\n

Messaging: WhatsApp opens up, however Apple’s iMessage waits within the wings<\/h3>\n

Meta holds gatekeeper standing for number-independent interpersonal communications companies due to WhatsApp and Messenger, with WhatsApp the most well-liked messaging software within the EU by a large margin. Article 7 of the DMA requires interoperability for sure fundamental messaging capabilities, and that obligation produced a concrete lead to November 2025:\u00a0limited interoperability between WhatsApp and two smaller European providers<\/a>, Latvia’s Birdychat and Switzerland’s Haiket.<\/p>\n

The paper is cautious, although, to determine who is definitely positioned to learn most from any additional opening. Apple’s iMessage additionally met the gatekeeper presumption thresholds beneath Article 3(2) however rebutted them in a separate Fee market investigation. “Higher contestability of Meta’s place in relation to NIICS is subsequently more likely to profit Apple first,” the paper states. It provides that Instagram’s personal messaging perform operates as a de facto competitor to WhatsApp in a number of EU international locations, additional complicating any clear narrative about various suppliers gaining floor. This messaging-market evaluation positive aspects further relevance from a separate DMA dispute the paper doesn’t itself cowl:\u00a0the EU General Court’s June 3, 2026 ruling<\/a>\u00a0that annulled Fb Market’s gatekeeper standing whereas explicitly upholding Messenger’s classification as a standalone NIICS, a call that reinforces how tightly the Fee’s messaging-market framework is now certain to Meta’s compliance obligations.<\/p>\n

Working techniques: American gatekeepers, American switching locations<\/h3>\n

Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft maintain gatekeeper standing for working techniques. Article 6(9) of the DMA offers finish customers information portability rights meant to ease switching to various techniques, one thing the paper flags as notably essential for cellular units holding contacts and pictures. Essentially the most practical alternate options not managed by a gatekeeper run on the open-source Linux kernel, together with Linux Mint for desktops and Sailfish OS for telephones. Android itself stays open-source at its core by means of the Android Open-Supply Mission, a basis that has enabled additional derivatives equivalent to LineageOS and GrapheneOS.<\/p>\n

In follow, although, the paper experiences that Article 6(9)’s portability requirement has to this point produced solely an eSIM switch software collectively constructed by Alphabet and Apple, letting customers transfer cellphone numbers between iPhones and Android units, with an additional data-transfer software in growth. Blockx’s evaluation is unambiguous about what that represents: a consumer transferring from an Apple system to a Google system, or the reverse, is switching between two American gatekeepers, contributing nothing to EU digital sovereignty. “EU digital sovereignty on this discipline is a great distance off,” the paper concludes for this class.<\/p>\n

Browsers: the one class the place the paper finds actual, measured positive aspects<\/h3>\n

Internet browsers stand out within the paper as the only class the place contestability seems to be producing a real, quantified shift. Alphabet’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari are gatekeepers, and Article 6(3) of the DMA requires them to current EU customers with a selection display screen when setting a default browser. Blockx cites a 2026 examine revealed as NBER Working Paper 35112, authored by Jesper Akesson, Kush Amlani, Raul Cepeda Suarez, Emily Chissell, Stefan Hunt, Michael Luca and Gemma Petrie, which used Mozilla Basis information to check cellular browser adoption inside and out of doors the EU. The examine discovered the choice-screen requirement drove meaningfully larger Firefox use on cellular units inside the EU than in markets the place the DMA doesn’t apply, translating to an estimated 6 million further Firefox customers.<\/p>\n

Even right here, the paper’s discovering carries a qualification that undercuts a easy sovereignty narrative. Mozilla, the beneficiary of that consumer progress, is an American nonprofit. The paper ranks EU browser recognition as Chrome first, Safari second, after which Microsoft’s Edge and Mozilla’s Firefox in third and fourth place, each American. Solely the fifth and sixth hottest browsers, Samsung Web Browser from Korea and Opera, Norwegian with Chinese language possession, are non-American, and each are markedly smaller. Norway’s Vivaldi and Sweden’s Mullvad path additional nonetheless. “Internet browsers are however the core platform service for which the DMA offers the obvious contestability and for which the alternatives for the expansion of EU alternate options are biggest,” the paper states, a relatively optimistic be aware relative to its remedy of each different class.<\/p>\n

Why American antitrust complainants preserve successful American positive aspects<\/h2>\n

One of many paper’s extra pointed sections traces who really filed the antitrust complaints that formed the Fee’s pre-DMA enforcement document towards the identical seven corporations now designated as gatekeepers. Blockx finds that American corporations have been continuously the driving pressure behind instances introduced towards different American corporations. Within the Google Buying case, which produced a 2.4 billion euro fantastic, Microsoft was a complainant each straight and thru its German subsidiary Ciao GmbH, alongside American corporations Yelp, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Information Company and Getty Pictures. Within the Google Android case, which produced a bigger fantastic later confirmed on enchantment, the grievance got here from Fairsearch, described within the paper as a Microsoft-associated foyer group, and the Microsoft-controlled Initiative for a Aggressive On-line Market.\u00a0That Android fine was finalized just six days before this paper’s publication<\/a>: the Courtroom of Justice of the European Union dismissed Google’s enchantment in full on July 2, 2026, confirming the 4.125 billion euro penalty with Alphabet collectively chargeable for 1.52 billion euros of that complete, closing eight years of litigation that started with the identical Fairsearch grievance Blockx cites.<\/p>\n

The Apple anti-steering fantastic of 1.8 billion euros, the paper notes, adopted a grievance from Sweden’s Spotify, although the a lot broader anti-steering provision written into Article 5(4) of the DMA itself was formed by a separate, long-running dispute with the American gaming firm Epic.\u00a0A 500 million euro DMA non-compliance fine against Apple<\/a>\u00a0adopted in April 2025 for violations of that very same provision, alongside a 200 million euro fantastic towards Meta. The paper’s broader argument is that this sample is unlikely to alter just because the DMA has changed older antitrust instruments: American challengers, not European ones, are usually the events positioned and resourced to behave on new contestability guidelines once they open up.<\/p>\n

The paradox of pressured entry<\/h2>\n

A separate part of the paper raises a structural concern that runs considerably towards the DMA’s personal logic. Blockx compares the regulation to public utility guidelines utilized in telecommunications and vitality, the place mandated entry to a dominant community is supposed to ask competitors. However utility regulation of that sort carries a recognized danger, borrowed from a 1990 paper by economists Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole on what they termed cream-skimming: entry guidelines could make it extra engaging for downstream companies to maintain coping with the incumbent slightly than change to a genuinely new upstream supplier, entrenching the very dominance the rule was meant to erode.<\/p>\n

Blockx applies this concern particularly to Article 6(7) of the DMA, which requires operating-system gatekeepers to make sure third-party {hardware} and software program interoperate with their platforms. If software program and {hardware} makers can already obtain full interoperability with Android and iOS, the paper argues, they’ve correspondingly much less incentive to construct for a completely separate, various working system. The Fee’s twin objective for the DMA, making markets each extra contestable and extra honest, can subsequently work towards itself in instances involving non-EU gatekeepers: growing equity of entry to the incumbent’s system can scale back the strain to construct actual opponents to that system, which is the other of what sovereignty, because the paper defines it, requires.<\/p>\n

What the paper says is lacking<\/h2>\n

Blockx is specific that the DMA covers solely ten outlined core platform companies, and gatekeepers have to this point been named for simply eight of these. Cloud computing, although listed among the many ten from the outset, has no designated gatekeeper. That hole started closing solely in November 2025, when\u00a0the Commission opened parallel market investigations into whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated<\/a>, investigations the paper notes stay unresolved as of its writing.<\/p>\n

Past the DMA’s personal boundaries, the paper flags a whole tier of infrastructure the regulation doesn’t attain in any respect: Area Title System decision suppliers, most of them based mostly exterior the EU and predominantly in the USA, regardless of DNS being handled as crucial beneath the EU’s NIS2 cybersecurity directive. It additionally cites the European Fee’s personal Cloud Sovereignty Framework, revealed in October 2025, which defines full digital sovereignty as a state the place know-how and operations sit beneath full EU management with no crucial non-EU dependencies.\u00a0That framework has drawn its own criticism<\/a>\u00a0for weighting supply-chain elements extra closely than authorized independence from overseas jurisdiction in its scoring methodology, a rigidity that sits alongside Blockx’s broader argument that good intentions in EU digital coverage don’t mechanically translate into decreased dependency.<\/p>\n

Blockx’s personal suggestion is that the DMA can not carry the sovereignty objective alone. He factors to the EU’s long-running Financial savings and Funding Union proposals, aimed toward integrating European monetary markets in order that European digital suppliers can elevate capital extra simply, and to newer authorities procurement guidelines requiring public our bodies to confirm how a lot real management they maintain over the cloud companies they use for public-order capabilities.<\/p>\n

Perception for the advertising and promoting sector<\/h2>\n

For promoting and advertising professionals monitoring DMA compliance, the paper’s findings carry a selected, sensible implication: platform-level obligations that look an identical on paper can produce very completely different aggressive outcomes relying on who’s positioned to use them.\u00a0PPC Land’s coverage of Google’s pending record DMA fine<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the Commission’s push to force Google to open search data to rivals<\/a>\u00a0has tracked the enforcement mechanics intimately. Blockx’s paper provides a layer these enforcement tales don’t normally handle on their very own: even a totally profitable compliance consequence within the Google Search data-sharing case is probably going to assist Microsoft’s Bing and America’s DuckDuckGo earlier than it helps Ecosia or Qwant, just because these corporations have the present scale and technical infrastructure to behave on new entry rights instantly.<\/p>\n

That distinction issues for anybody budgeting media spend, evaluating platform focus danger, or advising purchasers on the place real aggressive alternate options to Google, Meta or Amazon would possibly realistically emerge over the following a number of years.\u00a0The debate over whether the DMA amounts to anti-American regulation<\/a>, which former EU commissioners have publicly rejected as a mischaracterization, sits considerably orthogonally to Blockx’s precise argument. His level will not be that the DMA targets American corporations unfairly. It’s that American corporations, gatekeepers and challengers alike, are merely those finest positioned to seize no matter new openings the legislation creates, whatever the legislation’s intent.\u00a0Ongoing scrutiny of the DMA’s first formal review process<\/a>, which opened for public session in 2025, will probably must grapple with precisely this distinction if the evaluation is to provide adjustments that meaningfully shift the sovereignty calculus slightly than merely reshuffling which American firm holds the benefit in a given market.<\/p>\n

Timeline<\/h2>\n
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  • 1933: The Montevideo Conference establishes the classical territorial definition of statehood later cited within the paper as inapplicable to our on-line world<\/li>\n
  • 1990: Economists Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole publish their cream-skimming evaluation of utility regulation, later utilized by the paper to Article 6(7) DMA<\/li>\n
  • 1996: John Perry Barlow publishes the Declaration of the Independence of Our on-line world, cited as an early declare that states maintain no sovereignty on-line<\/li>\n
  • 2022: The EU is estimated to depend upon overseas suppliers for over 80 p.c of its digital merchandise, companies, infrastructure and mental property<\/li>\n
  • 2022: The Digital Markets Act is adopted, getting into into pressure in November of that yr<\/li>\n
  • 2023: The European Fee designates the unique six gatekeepers beneath the DMA<\/li>\n
  • 2024: Alphabet discloses that YouTube reaches 433.8 million distinct EU consumer accounts month-to-month<\/li>\n
  • Early 2025: US President Donald Trump sanctions ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, main Microsoft to cancel Khan’s electronic mail handle<\/li>\n
  • April 2025: The European Fee fines Apple 500 million euros and Meta 200 million euros within the first main DMA non-compliance selections<\/li>\n
  • First half of 2025: Microsoft experiences a mean of 55 million logged-in LinkedIn customers month-to-month throughout the EU<\/li>\n
  • November 2025: WhatsApp launches restricted interoperability with Latvia’s Birdychat and Switzerland’s Haiket<\/li>\n
  • November 2025: The European Fee opens market investigations into whether or not AWS and Microsoft Azure ought to be designated as cloud gatekeepers<\/li>\n
  • Late 2025: The Worldwide Felony Courtroom strikes from Microsoft’s companies to the open-source openDesk platform<\/li>\n
  • January 27, 2026: The Fee opens Article 8(2) specification proceedings in case DMA.100209 regarding Google Search data-sharing<\/li>\n
  • June 1, 2026: Bluesky reaches near 45 million registered customers and Mastodon near 10 million, in response to figures cited within the paper<\/li>\n
  • June 3, 2026: The EU Basic Courtroom annuls Fb Market’s gatekeeper designation whereas upholding Messenger’s classification<\/li>\n
  • June 29, 2026: Jan Blockx dates and posts “The DMA’s Contribution to EU Digital Sovereignty” to SSRN<\/li>\n
  • July 2, 2026: The Courtroom of Justice of the European Union confirms Google’s 4.125 billion euro Android fantastic, dismissing the enchantment in full<\/li>\n
  • July 7, 2026: The paper receives its final revision on SSRN<\/li>\n
  • July 8, 2026: Blockx pronounces the paper publicly on LinkedIn<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Abstract<\/h2>\n

    Who:<\/strong>\u00a0Jan Blockx, assistant professor on the College of Antwerp and an assessor within the Belgian Competitors Authority’s decision-making physique, authored the paper. The seven corporations designated as DMA gatekeepers, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Reserving, together with the European Fee, are the first topics of its evaluation.<\/p>\n

    What:<\/strong>\u00a0A 17-page SSRN working paper argues that the Digital Markets Act can contribute to EU digital sovereignty solely inside a slim scope, since many of the corporations finest positioned to learn from new contestability guidelines are themselves based mostly in the USA slightly than the EU or different diversified jurisdictions.<\/p>\n

    When:<\/strong>\u00a0The paper is dated June 29, 2026, with a final SSRN revision on July 7, 2026. Blockx introduced it publicly by way of LinkedIn right this moment, July 8, 2026.<\/p>\n

    The place:<\/strong>\u00a0The evaluation issues the European Union and European Financial Space, overlaying enforcement actions and market information from the European Fee, nationwide courts, and firm disclosures throughout the EU’s 27 member states.<\/p>\n

    Why:<\/strong>\u00a0The paper issues as a result of it straight checks, market by market, a extensively held assumption that opening dominant digital platforms to competitors mechanically strengthens European independence from overseas know-how suppliers. Its central discovering, that almost definitely beneficiaries of elevated contestability are different American corporations slightly than European or diversified alternate options, carries direct implications for a way policymakers, entrepreneurs and platform strategists ought to interpret the sensible affect of DMA enforcement going ahead.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n