A University of Antwerp law professor yesterday published a working paper concluding that the Digital Markets Act can help reduce the European Union's dependence on foreign technology providers, but only in narrow circumstances, and mostly not the ones regulators had hoped for. Jan Blockx, an assistant professor at the University of Antwerp who also sits as an assessor in the decision-making body of the Belgian Competition Authority, posted the paper to the Social Science Research Network on June 29, 2026, with a last revision recorded on July 7, 2026. He announced it publicly on LinkedIn, where the post drew 82 reactions within roughly a day.

The paper, titled "The DMA's Contribution to EU Digital Sovereignty," runs 17 pages and works through six of the ten core platform services covered by the regulation. Its central finding cuts against a common assumption in Brussels policy circles: that forcing gatekeepers to open their platforms to competition will automatically strengthen Europe's hand against foreign digital dependency. Blockx argues that in most markets it will not, because the companies best positioned to benefit from new contestability rules are themselves American.

What the paper actually measures

Blockx defines digital sovereignty narrowly and explicitly, breaking from centuries of political theory on the term. Citing sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin's original formulation of sovereignty as absolute state power, and the 1933 Montevideo Convention's territorial definition of statehood, the paper argues that neither framework transfers cleanly to cyberspace. Instead, Blockx adopts a functional test: digital sovereignty is impeded whenever an irreplaceable share of digital services in the EU is controlled by companies answerable to a single foreign government. Sovereignty improves, on this definition, only when a service category has multiple providers from different jurisdictions, so that no single foreign state can lean on all of them at once.

That framing matters because it changes what counts as a win. Under a looser definition, any new entrant competing with Google or Meta might look like progress. Under Blockx's test, a European losing ground to Google only to gain ground to Microsoft's Bing changes nothing, because the EU remains dependent on American jurisdiction either way.

The paper opens with a real-world illustration of what dependency costs in practice. After International Criminal Court 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, according to the paper, subsequently cancelled Khan's email address, a decision that hampered the court's work and was compounded by further US sanctions on nine ICC judges over the following months. By late 2025, the paper states, the ICC had switched away from Microsoft entirely, moving instead to openDesk, open-source workplace software developed by the German state-owned company ZenDIS. The episode, Blockx writes, shows how "dependency on non-EU digital services can undermine the ability of the EU and its member states to enforce their own laws."

The scale of the underlying dependency

The paper cites a 2022 estimate, drawn from a CERRE report by Paul Timmers, that the EU depended on foreign countries for more than 80 percent of the digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property used within its borders. As of June 2026, according to the paper, seven companies hold gatekeeper status under the Digital Markets Act across 23 designated services spanning eight of the regulation's ten core platform service categories. All seven are headquartered outside the EU: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta in the United States, and ByteDance, whose parent is based in the Cayman Islands, in China.

Six markets, six different outcomes

The paper's most substantive contribution is its market-by-market walkthrough, testing whether the DMA's contestability provisions are likely to help European or diversified alternatives gain ground, or whether they will mostly benefit other American firms.

Search: a 90 percent share that data-sharing rules have not yet touched

Alphabet is the sole gatekeeper for online search engines in the EU, with Google Search holding what the paper describes as a market share of around 90 percent, a figure the European Commission's own decisional record supports. Eighteen European industry groups pressed the Commission in March 2026 to issue a formal non-compliance decision against Alphabet, citing that same dominant position. The Commission has since moved further: it opened specification proceedings under Article 8(2) on January 27, 2026, in case DMA.100209, aimed at clarifying how Alphabet must share ranking, query, click and view data with rival search engines under Article 6(11) of the DMA. Those proceedings, and the pressure behind them, sit at the centre of the paper's search-market analysis.

Blockx quotes Ecosia's public argument that data access is "essential" for the German search engine to improve results, with Ecosia stating it needs "to go from answering two-thirds of queries to 100 percent." Ecosia and the French search engine Qwant have jointly founded the European Search Perspective, a foundation working toward a European search-ranking algorithm capable of competing with Google.

But the paper's verdict on search is blunt: even if the data-sharing rules work as designed, they will not meaningfully reduce EU dependence on American providers, because the second-largest search engine in Europe is not European. It is Microsoft's Bing. Microsoft itself, the paper notes, initially met the quantitative thresholds that would have triggered a gatekeeper presumption for its own search engine, but rebutted that presumption in a Commission market investigation, arguing that a gatekeeper designation would make it harder for Bing to challenge Google's position. DuckDuckGo, also American, outperforms both Ecosia and Qwant in European usage. "Increased contestability of the position of Google Search will therefore not be sufficient to reduce the EU's dependency on US providers for search services," the paper concludes.

Social networking: three gatekeepers, three different countries, one weak spot

Three companies hold gatekeeper status for online social networking: Meta for Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft for LinkedIn, and ByteDance for TikTok. Because these three are not all headquartered in the same jurisdiction, the paper credits this market with a built-in sovereignty advantage that most other DMA-covered categories lack. Facebook and Instagram each had 250 million EU users as of 2022, according to the ByteDance gatekeeper designation decision cited in the paper, with TikTok at 125 million. Microsoft has reported an average of 55 million logged-in LinkedIn users monthly in the first half of 2025, alongside 213 million logged-out site visits.

Yet the paper finds little room for genuine alternatives to grow. Open-source options exist: Bluesky, built on the AT Protocol, had close to 45 million registered users as of June 1, 2026, and Mastodon, running on ActivityPub, had close to 10 million. Both are described in the paper as "small fry" next to the incumbents. The next tier of alternatives beyond the four gatekeeping services is entirely American too: Pinterest at 124 million EU users, Twitter/X at 115 million, and Snapchat at 104 million, drawn from Digital Services Act disclosure data. X itself met the DMA's gatekeeper thresholds but successfully rebutted the presumption in a Commission investigation. The paper also notes that the DMA contains no interoperability mandate for social networking services, unlike its requirement for messaging apps, and that the Commission's first three-yearly review concluded it would be premature to add one.

Video: a 97 percent reach that dwarfs its nearest rival

Alphabet is the only gatekeeper for video-sharing platforms, owing to YouTube. According to information Alphabet itself disclosed in 2024, YouTube reaches 433.8 million distinct user accounts in the EU monthly, a figure the paper points out represents roughly 97 percent of the entire EU population. Dailymotion, based in France and the most significant alternative platform, reported fewer than 45 million active EU users monthly as of 2026, under 10 percent of the population. The paper's assessment is that even a highly effective DMA would need to work extraordinarily hard to make a meaningful dent in a position that lopsided, and that the platforms most likely to absorb any lost YouTube traffic are TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, not Dailymotion.

Messaging: WhatsApp opens up, but Apple's iMessage waits in the wings

Meta holds gatekeeper status for number-independent interpersonal communications services because of WhatsApp and Messenger, with WhatsApp the most popular messaging application in the EU by a wide margin. Article 7 of the DMA requires interoperability for certain basic messaging functions, and that obligation produced a concrete result in November 2025: limited interoperability between WhatsApp and two smaller European providers, Latvia's Birdychat and Switzerland's Haiket.

The paper is careful, though, to identify who is actually positioned to benefit most from any further opening. Apple's iMessage also met the gatekeeper presumption thresholds under Article 3(2) but rebutted them in a separate Commission market investigation. "Greater contestability of Meta's position in relation to NIICS is therefore likely to benefit Apple first," the paper states. It adds that Instagram's own messaging function operates as a de facto competitor to WhatsApp in several EU countries, further complicating any clean narrative about alternative providers gaining ground. This messaging-market analysis gains additional relevance from a separate DMA dispute the paper does not itself cover: the EU General Court's June 3, 2026 ruling that annulled Facebook Marketplace's gatekeeper status while explicitly upholding Messenger's classification as a standalone NIICS, a decision that reinforces how tightly the Commission's messaging-market framework is now bound to Meta's compliance obligations.

Operating systems: American gatekeepers, American switching destinations

Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft hold gatekeeper status for operating systems. Article 6(9) of the DMA gives end users data portability rights meant to ease switching to alternative systems, something the paper flags as particularly important for mobile devices holding contacts and photographs. The most functional alternatives not controlled by a gatekeeper run on the open-source Linux kernel, including Linux Mint for desktops and Sailfish OS for phones. Android itself remains open-source at its core through the Android Open-Source Project, a foundation that has enabled further derivatives such as LineageOS and GrapheneOS.

In practice, though, the paper reports that Article 6(9)'s portability requirement has so far produced only an eSIM transfer tool jointly built by Alphabet and Apple, letting users move phone numbers between iPhones and Android devices, with a further data-transfer tool in development. Blockx's assessment is unambiguous about what that represents: a user moving from an Apple device to a Google device, or the reverse, is switching between two American gatekeepers, contributing nothing to EU digital sovereignty. "EU digital sovereignty in this field is a long way off," the paper concludes for this category.

Browsers: the one category where the paper finds real, measured gains

Web browsers stand out in the paper as the sole category where contestability appears to be producing a genuine, quantified shift. Alphabet's Chrome and Apple's Safari are gatekeepers, and Article 6(3) of the DMA requires them to present EU users with a choice screen when setting a default browser. Blockx cites a 2026 study published 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 Foundation data to compare mobile browser adoption inside and outside the EU. The study found the choice-screen requirement drove meaningfully higher Firefox use on mobile devices within the EU than in markets where the DMA does not apply, translating to an estimated 6 million additional Firefox users.

Even here, the paper's finding carries a qualification that undercuts a simple sovereignty narrative. Mozilla, the beneficiary of that user growth, is an American nonprofit. The paper ranks EU browser popularity as Chrome first, Safari second, and then Microsoft's Edge and Mozilla's Firefox in third and fourth place, both American. Only the fifth and sixth most popular browsers, Samsung Internet Browser from Korea and Opera, Norwegian with Chinese ownership, are non-American, and both are markedly smaller. Norway's Vivaldi and Sweden's Mullvad trail further still. "Web browsers are nevertheless the core platform service for which the DMA provides the most obvious contestability and for which the opportunities for the growth of EU alternatives are greatest," the paper states, a comparatively optimistic note relative to its treatment of every other category.

Why American antitrust complainants keep winning American gains

One of the paper's more pointed sections traces who actually filed the antitrust complaints that shaped the Commission's pre-DMA enforcement record against the same seven companies now designated as gatekeepers. Blockx finds that American firms were frequently the driving force behind cases brought against other American firms. In the Google Shopping case, which produced a 2.4 billion euro fine, Microsoft was a complainant both directly and through its German subsidiary Ciao GmbH, alongside American firms Yelp, Expedia, TripAdvisor, News Corporation and Getty Images. In the Google Android case, which produced a larger fine later confirmed on appeal, the complaint came from Fairsearch, described in the paper as a Microsoft-associated lobby group, and the Microsoft-controlled Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace. That Android fine was finalized just six days before this paper's publication: the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed Google's appeal in full on July 2, 2026, confirming the 4.125 billion euro penalty with Alphabet jointly liable for 1.52 billion euros of that total, closing eight years of litigation that began with the same Fairsearch complaint Blockx cites.

The Apple anti-steering fine of 1.8 billion euros, the paper notes, followed a complaint from Sweden's Spotify, though the much broader anti-steering provision written into Article 5(4) of the DMA itself was shaped by a separate, long-running dispute with the American gaming company Epic. A 500 million euro DMA non-compliance fine against Apple followed in April 2025 for violations of that same provision, alongside a 200 million euro fine against Meta. The paper's broader argument is that this pattern is unlikely to change simply because the DMA has replaced older antitrust tools: American challengers, not European ones, tend to be the parties positioned and resourced to act on new contestability rules when they open up.

The paradox of forced access

A separate section of the paper raises a structural concern that runs somewhat against the DMA's own logic. Blockx compares the regulation to public utility rules used in telecommunications and energy, where mandated access to a dominant network is meant to invite competition. But utility regulation of that kind carries a known risk, borrowed from a 1990 paper by economists Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole on what they termed cream-skimming: access rules can make it more attractive for downstream businesses to keep dealing with the incumbent rather than switch to a genuinely new upstream provider, entrenching the very dominance the rule was meant to erode.

Blockx applies this concern specifically to Article 6(7) of the DMA, which requires operating-system gatekeepers to ensure third-party hardware and software interoperate with their platforms. If software and hardware makers can already achieve full interoperability with Android and iOS, the paper argues, they have correspondingly less incentive to build for an entirely separate, alternative operating system. The Commission's dual goal for the DMA, making markets both more contestable and more fair, can therefore work against itself in cases involving non-EU gatekeepers: increasing fairness of access to the incumbent's system can reduce the pressure to build real competitors to that system, which is the opposite of what sovereignty, as the paper defines it, requires.

What the paper says is missing

Blockx is explicit that the DMA covers only ten defined core platform services, and gatekeepers have so far been named for just eight of those. Cloud computing, though listed among the ten from the outset, has no designated gatekeeper. That gap began closing only in November 2025, when the Commission opened parallel market investigations into whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated, investigations the paper notes remain unresolved as of its writing.

Beyond the DMA's own boundaries, the paper flags an entire tier of infrastructure the regulation does not reach at all: Domain Name System resolution providers, most of them based outside the EU and predominantly in the United States, despite DNS being treated as critical under the EU's NIS2 cybersecurity directive. It also cites the European Commission's own Cloud Sovereignty Framework, published in October 2025, which defines full digital sovereignty as a state where technology and operations sit under complete EU control with no critical non-EU dependencies. That framework has drawn its own criticism for weighting supply-chain factors more heavily than legal independence from foreign jurisdiction in its scoring methodology, a tension that sits alongside Blockx's broader argument that good intentions in EU digital policy do not automatically translate into reduced dependency.

Blockx's own recommendation is that the DMA cannot carry the sovereignty goal alone. He points to the EU's long-running Savings and Investment Union proposals, aimed at integrating European financial markets so that European digital providers can raise capital more easily, and to newer government procurement rules requiring public bodies to verify how much genuine control they retain over the cloud services they use for public-order functions.

Insight for the marketing and advertising sector

For advertising and marketing professionals tracking DMA compliance, the paper's findings carry a specific, practical implication: platform-level obligations that look identical on paper can produce very different competitive outcomes depending on who is positioned to exploit them. PPC Land's coverage of Google's pending record DMA fine and the Commission's push to force Google to open search data to rivals has tracked the enforcement mechanics in detail. Blockx's paper adds a layer those enforcement stories do not usually address on their own: even a fully successful compliance outcome in the Google Search data-sharing case is likely to help Microsoft's Bing and America's DuckDuckGo before it helps Ecosia or Qwant, simply because those firms have the existing scale and technical infrastructure to act on new access rights immediately.

That distinction matters for anyone budgeting media spend, evaluating platform concentration risk, or advising clients on where genuine competitive alternatives to Google, Meta or Amazon might realistically emerge over the next several years. The debate over whether the DMA amounts to anti-American regulation, which former EU commissioners have publicly rejected as a mischaracterization, sits somewhat orthogonally to Blockx's actual argument. His point is not that the DMA targets American companies unfairly. It is that American companies, gatekeepers and challengers alike, are simply the ones best positioned to capture whatever new openings the law creates, regardless of the law's intent. Ongoing scrutiny of the DMA's first formal review process, which opened for public consultation in 2025, will likely need to grapple with exactly this distinction if the review is to produce changes that meaningfully shift the sovereignty calculus rather than simply reshuffling which American company holds the advantage in a given market.

Timeline

  • 1933: The Montevideo Convention establishes the classical territorial definition of statehood later cited in the paper as inapplicable to cyberspace
  • 1990: Economists Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole publish their cream-skimming analysis of utility regulation, later applied by the paper to Article 6(7) DMA
  • 1996: John Perry Barlow publishes the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, cited as an early claim that states hold no sovereignty online
  • 2022: The EU is estimated to depend on foreign providers for over 80 percent of its digital products, services, infrastructure and intellectual property
  • 2022: The Digital Markets Act is adopted, entering into force in November of that year
  • 2023: The European Commission designates the original six gatekeepers under the DMA
  • 2024: Alphabet discloses that YouTube reaches 433.8 million distinct EU user accounts monthly
  • Early 2025: US President Donald Trump sanctions ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, leading Microsoft to cancel Khan's email address
  • April 2025: The European Commission fines Apple 500 million euros and Meta 200 million euros in the first major DMA non-compliance decisions
  • First half of 2025: Microsoft reports an average of 55 million logged-in LinkedIn users monthly across the EU
  • November 2025: WhatsApp launches limited interoperability with Latvia's Birdychat and Switzerland's Haiket
  • November 2025: The European Commission opens market investigations into whether AWS and Microsoft Azure should be designated as cloud gatekeepers
  • Late 2025: The International Criminal Court moves from Microsoft's services to the open-source openDesk platform
  • January 27, 2026: The Commission opens Article 8(2) specification proceedings in case DMA.100209 concerning Google Search data-sharing
  • June 1, 2026: Bluesky reaches close to 45 million registered users and Mastodon close to 10 million, according to figures cited in the paper
  • June 3, 2026: The EU General Court annuls Facebook Marketplace's gatekeeper designation while upholding Messenger's classification
  • June 29, 2026: Jan Blockx dates and posts "The DMA's Contribution to EU Digital Sovereignty" to SSRN
  • July 2, 2026: The Court of Justice of the European Union confirms Google's 4.125 billion euro Android fine, dismissing the appeal in full
  • July 7, 2026: The paper receives its last revision on SSRN
  • July 8, 2026: Blockx announces the paper publicly on LinkedIn

Summary

Who: Jan Blockx, assistant professor at the University of Antwerp and an assessor in the Belgian Competition Authority's decision-making body, authored the paper. The seven companies designated as DMA gatekeepers, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Booking, along with the European Commission, are the primary subjects of its analysis.

What: A 17-page SSRN working paper argues that the Digital Markets Act can contribute to EU digital sovereignty only within a narrow scope, since most of the companies best positioned to benefit from new contestability rules are themselves based in the United States rather than the EU or other diversified jurisdictions.

When: The paper is dated June 29, 2026, with a last SSRN revision on July 7, 2026. Blockx announced it publicly via LinkedIn today, July 8, 2026.

Where: The analysis concerns the European Union and European Economic Area, covering enforcement actions and market data from the European Commission, national courts, and company disclosures across the EU's 27 member states.

Why: The paper matters because it directly tests, market by market, a widely held assumption that opening dominant digital platforms to competition automatically strengthens European independence from foreign technology providers. Its central finding, that most likely beneficiaries of increased contestability are other American firms rather than European or diversified alternatives, carries direct implications for how policymakers, marketers and platform strategists should interpret the practical impact of DMA enforcement going forward.