The EU General Court on July 8 dismissed all three of Apple’s Digital Markets Act challenges in Joined Cases T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24, upholding the Commission’s September 2023 gatekeeper designation of iOS and the App Store and ruling Apple’s iMessage complaint inadmissible on grounds the service was never listed in a designation decision to begin with. The immediate loser is Apple. The structural loser is Google.

The ruling installs a sequencing rule across all six designated gatekeepers, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance, that pre-emptive litigation against DMA obligations is procedurally unavailable until the Commission issues a specific enforcement decision. Abstract challenges to the framework itself won’t be heard. Assimakis Komninos, competition partner at White & Case, summarized the court’s message on Apple’s interoperability arguments in one word: “premature”.

For Google, the timing is unforgiving. Two proceedings opened on January 27, 2026 (DMA.100220 under Article 6(7), targeting free and effective interoperability with Android’s AI layer, and DMA.100209 under Article 6(11), forcing anonymized Search ranking, query, click and view data onto FRAND terms for rival engines and AI chatbots) reach their six-month statutory conclusion on July 27. That’s 18 days. There’s no longer a courtroom exit.

The stakes track Google’s structural position: roughly 95% of EU search, and Gemini installed as the default AI on every Android phone in Europe earlier this year. Both are now inside the Commission’s specification window.

AWS and Azure, watching from an earlier stage of the same pipeline, have until September to contest cloud gatekeeper designation, with a Commission decision expected in November. The court didn’t just close a door for Apple. It ordered the queue.

Sources

Sources