On June 11, 2026, Apple told users in the EU that its new Siri AI features would not ship alongside iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. The company blamed the Digital Markets Act (DMA): under "EU regulators' extreme interpretation," Apple argued, it would have to "give any virtual assistant direct access to users' private data" and "the ability to act on that access autonomously." Software chief Craig Federighi said Apple now has "no timeline" for the feature in the bloc.
The European Commission was unimpressed. Its spokesperson retorted that "absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU," likening compliance to traffic law: "the EU will not give any exemptions, just like a police officer would not exempt the driver from respecting a speed limit." The clash landed weeks after the Commission's first statutory review of the DMA (April 28, 2026) declared the law "fit for purpose."
This is not Brussels' business alone. For New Delhi, the standoff is a real-time stress test of a regulatory model India came close to importing — and wisely paused.
The case India found compelling
The DMA's logic is genuinely attractive, and it deserves a fair hearing before it is criticised. Ex-post competition enforcement is slow: by the time a regulator proves abuse and exhausts appeals, the market may have already "tipped" irreversibly toward an incumbent. India's own Committee on Digital Competition Law made exactly this argument, concluding that the ex-post framework under the Competition Act, 2002 "may not be effective to address the irreversible tipping of markets in favour of large digital enterprises." Ex-ante rules — clear obligations on designated gatekeepers, enforced before harm crystallises — are meant to fix that timing problem. The Commission can point to results: its review credits the DMA with new app stores, interoperable messaging, easier data portability, and rising adoption of alternative browsers and search engines.
That is the strongest version of the pro-DMA case, and it is why India's draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024 borrowed the architecture almost wholesale: a class of "Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises" (SSDEs) crossing financial and user thresholds, subject to upfront do's-and-don'ts policed by the Competition Commission of India.
Why India stepped back
Then India did something the EU has not: it stopped to count the costs. Through 2025, the draft drew intense pushback from industry bodies, startups and MSMEs, who warned the ex-ante framework was "onerous," its SSDE thresholds ill-fitted to India's market, and its compliance timelines unworkable. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, in its 25th report (August 2025), recommended the bill be withdrawn and redrafted, flagging that administering nuanced ex-ante obligations is institutionally demanding and, absent trained specialist agencies, invites either regulatory capture or superficial oversight. On November 3, 2025, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs issued a fresh Request for Proposal to re-study the very thresholds the bill had hard-coded — an admission that the numbers were never settled.
The Apple episode shows what India sidestepped. The dispute is not about an abusive incumbent extracting rents; it is about whether a mandated interoperability obligation forces a company to expose private data to third-party assistants. Apple says it offered a phased compliance plan — a "Trusted System Agent" rolled out over 18 months — and the Commission said no. Reasonable people can dispute whether Apple is sincere or strategically gold-plating its objections. But the structural point stands: a blanket ex-ante mandate, applied uniformly "like a speed limit," cannot easily distinguish between gatekeeping that harms rivals and engineering choices that protect users. The result is that EU consumers wait indefinitely for a feature available everywhere else.
The proportionality lesson
None of this means India should let dominant platforms self-regulate. The harms are real — from self-preferencing to the trust Indians place in a handful of apps that scammers now exploit. The question is one of instrument design, not whether to act.
The DMA's own record cuts both ways. It has teeth — the Commission fined Apple €500 million in April 2025 for anti-steering breaches — but enforcement-by-decree also produces standoffs where the casualty is the European user, not the platform's bottom line. A €500 million fine is roughly 0.14% of Apple's worldwide turnover; a withheld product is a cost borne by citizens.
India's better path is the one it has stumbled into: evidence-first, capacity-matched, and targeted. Re-study the thresholds before designating anyone. Pair narrow ex-ante obligations — interoperability, data portability, anti-self-preferencing — with the flexibility to grant time-bound, conditional carve-outs where a rule provably degrades security or innovation. Build CCI's technical capacity before, not after, switching on the regime. And calibrate to a market where the platforms that need disciplining (including India's own UPI-era champions) differ from Brussels' six gatekeepers.
The EU may yet be proven right that holding firm forces compliant innovation. But a law that leaves 450 million consumers without a flagship AI feature, while its architects insist nothing is wrong, is not obviously "fit for purpose." India was right to ask the question Brussels skipped: not whether to regulate Big Tech, but how to do so without making citizens the collateral.