The General Court annulled the Commission’s designation of Marketplace under the Digital Markets Act, faulting its reasoning, while upholding the same label for Messenger.
Meta walked into the EU’s General Court asking it to strike down two gatekeeper labels and walked out having shed one. On 3 June the Luxembourg court annulled the European Commission’s designation of Facebook Marketplace as a “core platform service” under the Digital Markets Act, while upholding the same designation for Messenger. It is a split decision, and the reasons for the split matter more than the scoreline.
The court did not find that Marketplace is harmless or unimportant. It found that the Commission had not explained itself properly. The decision, the judges held, “does not satisfy the requirements in terms of reasoning as regards Marketplace,” failing to take account of recent developments in the service and leaving neither Meta nor the courts able to understand or review why it had been classified as a regulated gateway. That is an annulment on procedural grounds, not a ruling that Marketplace falls outside the DMA’s reach.
The distinction is the whole story. The Digital Markets Act lets the Commission designate the largest platforms as “gatekeepers” and impose standing obligations on them, interoperability, limits on self-preferencing, restrictions on combining user data, without litigating each case as a separate abuse.
