When Gatekeeper Status Travels

The further the law of the digital economy evolves, the more it governs through classifications. Firms are designated as ‘gatekeepers’, ‘very large online platforms’, ‘high-risk providers’, ‘systemic entities’ or ‘critical operators’. Legal consequences are attached to these classifications. In markets shaped by scale and control over digital infrastructures, such classifications determine who must provide access, who bears additional duties, and who is excluded from a newly created entitlement. They make complex forms of private power governable. But what happens if a classification assessment made for one purpose becomes legally relevant for another? The designation of an undertaking as a ‘gatekeeper’ under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) puts this question on the table. A ‘gatekeeper’ is not simply a description of corporate size, technological prominence or market power. It is a regulatory status conferred by a formal Commission designation decision, tied to specified core platform services and to an asymmetric body of obligations aimed at contestability and fairness. The Commission’s designation decision, the legal status resulting from it and the obligations it triggers belong to the same regulatory regime. The decision captures a particular form of intermediation power. It does not, however, establish that the undertaking is powerful in every market it enters or that it should be treated less favourably whenever the Union identifies a digital-policy problem.