Opera loses EU court fight to have Microsoft Edge labelled a gatekeeper

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.

Opera focused on a specific part of how Windows works. It told the court that “Edge, like Internet Explorer before it, is the gatekeeper through which users on Windows must pass to download” a rival browser, making the pre-installed browser a chokepoint regardless of how many users continue using it afterwards.

The broader goal was to bring desktop operating systems more fully under the DMA. Most of the regulation’s browser remedies, including the choice screens that changed the mobile market, have focused on smartphones, and Opera wanted the same principle applied to Windows.

The court rejected that argument. Its conclusion was straightforward: “The General Court upholds the Commission’s decision not to designate Microsoft as a gatekeeper in relation to Edge.”

Designation is what brings a service under the DMA’s obligations. A designated service cannot self-preference and must allow features such as uninstallation and third-party defaults, while serious breaches can result in fines of up to 10% of global turnover. That is why Apple and Microsoft fought to keep iMessage and Bing off the list during the same round of investigations.

Those challenges have generally gone the Commission’s way. Apple lost its own General Court challenge to its designation, while the Edge ruling now shows the court can also back the regulator when it decides not to designate a service.

For Opera, the decision has some history behind it. Its 2007 complaint over browser bundling on Windows eventually led to the EU’s browser ballot screen and, in 2013, a €561m fine against Microsoft for quietly dropping it.

Nineteen years later, the same company has failed to get a much newer piece of EU legislation applied to the same product. The regulatory framework has changed, and so has the outcome.

The ruling also lands at an awkward moment for Brussels. A European browser maker asked EU judges to expand the bloc’s rules against an American technology company and lost, while the Commission is facing sustained pressure from Washington over its wider use of the DMA.

The broader enforcement work continues. The Commission is examining whether AWS and Azure should be designated as cloud gatekeepers and has already issued its first DMA penalty, an €890m fine against Google.

What Wednesday’s ruling actually settles is narrower than the headline suggests. Meeting the DMA’s quantitative thresholds does not automatically require the Commission to designate a service, and a rival that believes the regulator got that judgement wrong will have a difficult time overturning it in court.

Opera has not publicly said whether it will appeal to the Court of Justice, and the accessible coverage of the judgment does not set out its options. Appeals on points of law can be brought within two months and ten days of notification.