Two years ago, the Digital Markets Act was the first of its kind: an ex ante competition framework introducing contestability and supporting innovation. But, as much as its critics try to cast it as a European experiment, it was never alone. In 2019, expert reports across the US, EU, UK and elsewhere studied the competitive dynamics of digital platforms. Today, the conversation has moved on to how to restore competition and choice within digital markets.
That shift was on display at Mozilla’s event in Brussels on 2 June, “Rebalancing Digital Markets: Delivering Competition, Choice, and the Road Ahead.” Regulators and policymakers from the EU, UK, Japan, and Brazil came together to assess what two years of reform have delivered and what still needs to happen. The answer was clearer than expected: ex ante competition regulation works, but only where it has been properly enforced.
The proof of concept holds
The DMA’s browser choice screen obligations have produced real, measurable results. We have written about the data in detail. The headline numbers: Firefox has been selected via a DMA choice screen over six million times in two years, once every ten seconds. Daily active users in the EU have grown to double those in comparable countries. People who choose Firefox through a choice screen are five times more likely to stick with it than those who arrive organically. The core finding is simple: this is what competition looks like when it is allowed to work. When users are given a genuine, well-designed choice, they take it. That was not a given. Earlier choice screens resulting from ex post antitrust processes produced no measurable impact. What changed was rigour and enforcement: working with behavioural economists, testing interfaces carefully, focusing on outcomes rather than checkbox compliance.
The lesson extends well beyond browsers. Desktop remains largely untouched, leaving roughly 310 million desktops and laptops in the EU without an equivalent level of browser choice. Windows users are still frequently steered towards Microsoft’s own services through design choices that override user choice or make switching more difficult than it should be. Ensuring that users of all gatekeeper services can easily change default settings, free from manipulative practices or undue influence, remains a critical test for DMA implementation. Choice screens can help, but they are not a silver bullet. Ecosystem lock-in, interoperability barriers and entrenched defaults continue to limit competition and innovation. The window to address these issues before new forms of digital gatekeeping become entrenched remains open, but it will not stay open indefinitely.
Reform is going global and fast
The institutional approaches across jurisdictions may differ, but the direction of travel is increasingly similar. Policymakers are recognising the need to address concentrated power in digital markets, expand user choice, and create conditions for competition and innovation to flourish.
The UK has opted for a flexible, case-by-case model and has already designated Google and Apple in respect of their mobile platforms. Japan scoped its legislation tightly to mobile, moved quickly, and is now seeking to ensure effective compliance for Japanese smartphone users. Brazil is building a framework calibrated to its own market realities.
None of these jurisdictions is simply copying the EU’s DMA. All of them are drawing on their experience and developing ex ante frameworks that work for their people and their economies: what a good choice screen looks like in practice, what regulatory capacity is needed before a law enters into force, and what happens when the large tech companies seek to undermine rather than facilitate choice and competition.
What the momentum demands
The consistent lesson is unglamorous: the staff, expertise, and industry relationships needed to enforce these rules have to be built before the law arrives, not after.
A clearer consensus is also forming around what enforcement needs to deliver. Rules that look good on paper but do not change what users experience every day are not enough. Technical expertise matters, particularly as AI raises questions that economists and lawyers alone cannot answer. The European Commission’s ongoing proceedings in AI distribution are a test of exactly this: whether regulators can move fast enough to ensure competing AI services are able to reach users before vertical integration entrenches dominance. And regulators need to be clear-eyed about a pattern that has emerged across jurisdictions: gatekeepers framing incomplete compliance as a deliberate policy choice, rather than acknowledging it as a failure to meet their obligations.
These are sophisticated companies, and they will keep testing what regulators will accept. The measure of this generation of digital market frameworks is not whether they passed through legislatures, but whether they can deliver real impact for people.
For Mozilla, that means ensuring the lessons travel: to desktop, to AI, and to every jurisdiction building its own version of these rules. Competition, choice, and true innovation in digital markets should be the norm, not the exception.