European Commission Has No Plans for Digital Markets Act Supervisory Fee

The European Commission reportedly does not plan to charge Big Tech companies a fee to cover the cost of monitoring their compliance with the Digital Markets Act, though some European lawmakers have lobbied for such a fee. 

While that remains a possibility, there is currently no proposal for a fee, European Commission Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told Reuters in an interview for a report posted Wednesday (July 23).

The Digital Markets Act has been enforced since 2023 and applies to six Big Tech companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta Platforms and Microsoft, according to the report.

Proponents of a supervisory fee note that another piece of legislation that covers Big Tech, the Digital Services Act, charges big online platforms a fee that amounts to 0.05% of each company’s annual worldwide net income, per the report. 

It was reported in February 2024 that Meta Platforms and TikTok challenged the supervisory fee imposed on them under the Digital Services Act.

A TikTok spokesperson said at the time that the company objected to the methodology used for calculating the fee, highlighting the use of purportedly flawed third-party estimates of monthly active user numbers as a basis for determining the total amount.

However, the European Commission stood firm, with a spokesperson emphasizing the commission’s commitment to defending its position in court.

The European Commission said in March that it charged the largest online platforms a collective 58.2 million euros ($62.8 million) to cover the costs of its supervision of the Digital Services Act in 2025.

The yearly fees remain subject to legal challenge, with Meta, TikTok and Google having launched court cases challenging how their individual fees were calculated.

The Digital Services Act itself has been singled out by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance as an example of what he calls the European Union’s “excessive regulation” of artificial intelligence, including U.S.-based AI developers.

The law addressed Wednesday by Virkkunen, the Digital Markets Act, is designed to curb anti-competitive behavior. For example, it forbids platforms from prioritizing their own services over those of competitors and from amalgamating personal data from different services. It also bars companies from using data collected from third-party merchants to employ competitive practices against them, and says companies must allow users to download apps from rival platforms.

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