The Digital Markets Act designates large platforms that act as important gateways between businesses and consumers as "gatekeepers" and imposes ex-ante obligations on them — around self-preferencing, data access and portability, interoperability, and the terms offered to business users. It shifts competition enforcement from litigating abuses after the fact to prohibiting them in advance.
Digital Markets Act
Statute European Union
The DMA regulates a small number of very large platforms as infrastructure rather than as market participants. A designated gatekeeper faces standing obligations: it may not self-preference its own services, it must give business users access to the data they generate, it must permit data portability, and it must deal fairly with the businesses that depend on it.
- Ex ante - the obligations apply on designation, without proving an abuse first.
- Data access and portability are explicit - business users are entitled to effective, continuous real-time access to the data they generate on the platform.
- Designation is by activity - a firm is designated for the core platform services it operates.
The travel precedent
The DMA matters to this catalog because it is the only regime anywhere that has designated a travel intermediary as a gatekeeper. Booking.com’s designation brings an online travel intermediary inside a regime built around data access, portability and non-discriminatory dealing with business users — the hotels and operators whose inventory it distributes.
That is a significant fact against the backdrop the API Evangelist travel quartet measured. Across sixty-four organizations in four markets, nineteen of the forty newly researched have no second source at all, only three publish an open standard, seven document an exit path, and only seven are self-serve. Travel is the sector where switching cost is the commercial structure rather than a side effect, and no travel-specific instrument anywhere addresses it.
The State of UK Travel APIs records the British parallel: the DMCC Act 2024 gives the CMA equivalent machinery, and nothing in travel has been designated under it.
The transferable point is about which regulator arrives first. Travel’s switching costs are not going to be dismantled by aviation regulators, who license safety and financial protection, or by consumer regulators, who penalise misconduct after the fact. If they are dismantled by regulation at all, it will be by competition authorities treating distribution platforms as infrastructure — and the DMA is the only place that has started.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This regulation shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this regulation in the context of a real sector.
The State of Marketing & Advertising APIs
Gatekeeper obligations reshaping the advertising platforms this market buys through.
The State of UK Travel APIs
The only regime anywhere that has designated a travel intermediary as a gatekeeper — the nearest existing precedent for regulating travel distribution as infrastructure.
