The Apple and Meta cases mark the point at which Brussels stopped treating the Digital Markets Act as a warning system and began using it as an operating constraint on designated gatekeepers. The Commission opened the Apple and Meta investigations in March 2024 and issued non-compliance decisions on 23 April 2025, fining Apple EUR 500 million and Meta EUR 200 million.
Apple's control surface is developer steering and app distribution. The Commission says Apple's App Store terms restricted business users from telling customers about offers outside the platform. In a parallel Apple file, the Commission also kept pressure on alternative app-distribution terms, which makes the remedy question economic rather than merely procedural: can developers reach users through external routes without new friction making the route uneconomic?
Meta's control surface is consent and data combination. The Commission objected to a model that pushed Facebook and Instagram users toward either personalised advertising or a paid ad-free option. Its remedy supervision now turns on whether EU users receive a less data-intensive choice that is meaningfully equivalent, and whether the interface makes that choice practical rather than theoretical.
The impact mechanism is cumulative. If the Commission can measure and police remedy quality, the regime becomes a continuing governance layer over app-store economics, advertising-data use and gatekeeper interface design. If Apple and Meta can redesign compliance into fees, friction or weak defaults, the penalties become a manageable cost rather than a change in market structure.
The evidence is strongest on the regulatory sequence: investigation opening, breach decisions, penalty amounts and remedy pressure are all documented by the Commission. Apple and Meta company materials are useful context for how each firm frames compliance, business risk and user-choice design, but they do not by themselves prove that remedies are effective.
