They control access of businesses, in this case music labels, to the final customer.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
The DMA is about disintermediation of businesses from customers on large platforms with business and non-business users and durable user bases.
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled)
- track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en#what-d...
The assessment for whether Chrome qualified as a gatekeeper is less than 3 pages long. All they care about is whether they qualify as a platform and that they are over the threshold for active non-business users, active business users, revenue in the EU for enough time.
At no point did they concern themselves with potential anti-competitive practices in making the determination.
It's only after they're designated a gatekeeper that they're required to avoid things like self-preferencing or negotiating MFN terms with business. This conveniently allows the EU to pick and choose who the restrictive rules apply to on a company by company and product by product basis.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.
When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
Spotify most certainly does have strong network effects (your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses it, etc), data driven-advantages (Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data), lock-in effects (your playlist/history and all your friends' playlists are there), dependence of businesses users (Spotify is the go-to platform for music labels for promotion and only way to reach certain customers) and end users (because of network and lock-in effects).
From a brief search, Facebook and Google are responsible for ~60-80% or more of digital advertising spend. This is because of their data-driven advantages that come from the multisidedness of their services, forcing a dependence of business users.
While Spotify does have social features, I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account) and a feed showing what friends are listening to, if you connect to Facebook - which many don't. Additionally, Spotify has very open APIs that make it easy to move a playlist to another service: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
Facebook requires an account to access Marketplace, even to view it (lock-in effects), and many communities and neighborhoods have made Facebook the sole source of online discussion / information sharing (strong network effects.) Eschewing Facebook means missing information you can't get any other way. And it's literally impossible to avoid Google online.
Simply having a product and customers ("your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses") or an audience ("Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data") is not the same as being a gatekeeper.
Former Apple Music user here. I switched because of Spotify’s collaborative playlists. Technically, I could have used a sync solution to sync changes between platforms. In reality, it was just cheaper all around to switch to Spotify instead, and be on the same platform as my partner and friends. Being able to open Spotify links being sent to me without having to run it though some translation shortcut was wonderful.
Apple deleting all my playlists immediately after my subs lapsed was the icing on the cake to never return.
The criteria for gatekeepers are the following:
1. The company must have a core platform service in online advertising, browsers, intermediation (distribution), communication, OS, search engines, social networks, or video sharing. These are the areas of concern for the legislature.
2. They must have either a €7.5B turnover in the EEA for three consecutive years or a market capitalization of at least €75B.
3. For three consecutive years, it must have either over 45 million active EU users or over 10,000 active business EU users.
Initially, in 2020, the EC suggested that the market sectors concerned would also include travel, audio streaming, film/TV on-demand streaming, and e-commerce, as it identified significant market concentration in these areas. Spotify eats up 55% of the EU streaming market, and Booking.com - 35% of EU hotel bookings. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Sky, and DAZN collectively account for 90% of the EU TV/film streaming. Along with current market gatekeepers, these companies were the reason for the new EU DMA laws.
Today, Spotify arguably still meets the criteria. It is an intermediation platform that distributes music and podcasts, similar to YouTube, an identified gatekeeper, distributing videos and podcasts. It has nearly 200 million active users in the EEA and a market capitalization of over €120 billion. By all criteria, it should be included, and it was included at a point in time.
The only reason it's not included is procedural. The core platform services (area of concern) in final DMA didn't include audio streaming. Therefore, Spotify was never asked to self-assess for gatekeeper status, its assessment was never processed, and so on and so forth. The same applies to Booking.com.
It's relatively clear and transparent that these EU gatekeepers conveniently fell through the legislative loopholes. Then again, there are other unaccounted-for areas of concern/core platform services provided by other companies like Uber. Arguably, Uber's price-dumping strategy to monopolize markets poses a greater threat to EU consumers and local competing companies than Spotify. So why wasn't ride-sharing a core platform service in DMA? Who knows. Just one more suspicious omission, like Spotify.
The only justification I can think of for this that doesn't show EEA bias towards its own companies is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Maybe DMA regulation is coming for Spotify next, the EC just didn't do a thorough enough job this round.