Microsoft Edge will stay outside the European Union’s toughest tech rulebook. The bloc’s General Court on Wednesday rejected Opera’s challenge to the European Commission’s decision not to designate the browser as a gatekeeper service under the Digital Markets Act.
The Luxembourg-based court ruled that the Commission “did not err by accepting Microsoft’s sufficiently substantiated arguments to demonstrate that Edge did not constitute an important gateway” between businesses and consumers, according to Reuters. The judgment in Case T-357/24, Opera Norway v Commission, leaves the exemption in place.
Opera challenged a Commission decision from February 2024, which came after a market investigation into Microsoft. Edge had met the DMA’s quantitative threshold for user numbers, but Brussels accepted Microsoft’s argument that the browser was not an important gateway for reaching European users and closed the investigation.
Microsoft is a gatekeeper in the EU, just not for Edge. Windows and LinkedIn are designated core platform services under the DMA, while the same February 2024 investigation also concluded that Bing and Microsoft Advertising did not qualify.
The Norwegian browser maker filed for annulment in July 2024, arguing that the Commission had applied the designation test incorrectly and had failed to properly examine the issue that mattered most to Opera. Its argument was that Edge has a “durable and privileged position on Windows” that the Commission had not adequately assessed.
