The European Union’s General Court has upheld Microsoft Edge’s exemption from some of the Digital Markets Act’s toughest platform rules, giving the European Commission important judicial backing for the way it decides which digital services qualify as gatekeepers.

Judges in Luxembourg dismissed a challenge brought by Opera Norway against the Commission’s February 2024 decision not to designate Microsoft as a gatekeeper in relation to Edge. Although Microsoft crossed the DMA’s quantitative thresholds, the Commission concluded that its browser was not sufficiently important as a gateway through which businesses reach end users.

The court agreed, accepting that Edge’s relatively low level of use compared with rival browsers, its reliance on Google-backed Chromium browser engine Blink, and the limited effect of Microsoft’s efforts to promote Edge through Windows all supported the Commission’s decision. Opera’s action was dismissed in its entirety.

The ruling does not remove Microsoft from the DMA altogether. Windows and LinkedIn remain designated core platform services, while Edge joins Bing and Microsoft Advertising among Microsoft services that met the quantitative thresholds but escaped designation after the company argued that they did not satisfy the underlying gatekeeper test.

Under the DMA, a company is presumed to meet the gatekeeper criteria when, among other requirements, a core platform service reaches at least 45 million monthly active end users in the EU and 10,000 yearly active business users, alongside financial and geographic thresholds. Companies can nevertheless rebut that presumption if they provide sufficiently substantiated evidence that a service does not in practice occupy the position the legislation is designed to regulate.

That distinction between numerical scale and actual gatekeeping power sits at the centre of the Edge judgment. The DMA was designed to constrain platforms capable of setting the terms on which large numbers of businesses reach customers, rather than to place every service offered by a very large technology company under identical obligations simply because its owner clears a size threshold.

Numbers do not settle designation

For regulators, the judgment supports a relatively flexible reading of that test. The Commission was entitled to compare Edge with other browsers when judging its importance, while Microsoft’s wider control of Windows was not enough on its own to turn the browser into an important gateway between businesses and users.

The court also accepted the relevance of Edge’s technical architecture. Because the browser relies on Blink rather than an engine controlled solely by Microsoft, judges agreed that this reduced the company’s autonomous control over some important elements of the service, allowing a technical dependency to become part of the competition assessment.

Pre-installation proved insufficient as well. Microsoft distributes Edge with Windows and has repeatedly used its operating system and other services to promote the browser, yet the court accepted the Commission’s conclusion that those advantages had not translated into the level of gateway power needed for designation.

The decision therefore shows that the DMA’s headline thresholds create a presumption rather than an automatic outcome. They give the Commission a practical way to identify services requiring scrutiny, but the regulator must still examine how a particular service functions in its market and whether businesses materially depend on it to reach users.

That approach cuts both ways. Companies crossing the thresholds have a route to argue that a specific service should remain outside the regime, although they carry the burden of producing strong evidence. Conversely, the DMA also allows the Commission to investigate services that fall below the thresholds where their market position may nevertheless justify designation.

The Commission gains room to interpret

Opera’s challenge was therefore about more than the competitive position of two browsers. It tested how much discretion the Commission has when translating a regulation built around unusually explicit numerical criteria into decisions about individual digital services.

The General Court has now given the regulator substantial backing. Its judgment found no error in the Commission’s conclusion that Microsoft had rebutted the statutory presumption, while also confirming that Opera had standing to bring the challenge. Rivals remain able to contest designation decisions where they are directly and individually affected, even though Opera failed on the substance here.

For companies already within the DMA perimeter, the result adds weight to service-by-service arguments rather than treating gatekeeper designation as an all-or-nothing corporate status. Microsoft remains one of the companies formally designated under the law, but its treatment varies significantly across products.

That creates a regulatory framework in which product architecture, user behaviour, market dependence, and competitive position can matter alongside corporate scale. It also raises the evidential bar for challengers hoping to show that integration into a wider technology ecosystem should itself be enough to trigger gatekeeper obligations.

Opera can appeal the General Court’s decision to the Court of Justice on points of law within the applicable appeal period. Unless the judgment is overturned, Edge remains outside the DMA’s designated services, while the Commission has gained a useful precedent for treating statutory thresholds as the beginning of the gatekeeper analysis rather than its automatic conclusion.