A Ruling That Outlasted Apple's Challenge
On July 9, 2026, the EU General Court dismissed Apple's challenge to its 'gatekeeper' designation under the Digital Markets Act, upholding the European Commission's September 5, 2023 decision that named the App Store, iOS and Safari as 'core platform services' subject to DMA obligations (Joined Cases T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24). The court held that Apple's five App Store variants — for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV — must be treated as a single core platform service, rejecting Apple's argument that device-specific stores should be assessed separately. Apple's parallel challenge over the classification of iMessage was ruled inadmissible on procedural grounds, since the Commission never actually designated it a gatekeeper service. Apple can still appeal to the Court of Justice within two months and ten days, and two other cases — over forced iOS interoperability and a €500 million anti-steering fine — remain pending.
An Apple spokesperson responded that "the DMA's mandate goes beyond what is lawful and proportionate, threatening to erode decades of privacy and security protections." That the EU's first major gatekeeper designation has now cleared its first serious judicial test matters well beyond Brussels: it validates the DMA's core mechanism — pre-emptively naming dominant platforms and imposing structural obligations before harm is proven case by case — as the template other jurisdictions are actively weighing.
The Case for Ex-Ante Rules
The strongest argument for the EU's approach is speed. Traditional antitrust cases against Apple and Google's app store practices — Epic v. Apple in the US, the Commission's own earlier Spotify complaint — took years and produced fixes narrow enough that platforms could route around them. South Korea's National Assembly recognized this in 2021, passing what is widely regarded as the world's first law explicitly barring dominant app stores from mandating their own in-app payment systems. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission is still actively using its enforcement powers: on July 1, 2026, it announced findings that Google ran a program internally called "Project Hug" from 2019 to March 2026, paying game developers to favor Google Play over rivals like OneStore, implicating roughly $910 million in revenue and exposing Google to fines of up to 6% of that amount. Korea's regulators argue that without a clear ex-ante rule, this kind of exclusionary conduct persists for years before enforcement catches up.
Taiwan's Different Bet
Taiwan has looked at this same menu of options and chosen not to order the ex-ante dish. The Fair Trade Commission's draft White Paper on Competition Policy in the Digital Economy, first released in March 2022, stated that the agency "does not recommend imposing rigid, preemptive regulations on digital markets at this time," opting instead to sharpen its enforcement skills within the existing Fair Trade Act framework and deepen its understanding of digital markets through market studies. The FTC has continued down that path since — most recently publishing a 2025 consultation paper on generative AI and competition rather than a platform-specific gatekeeper regime.
Taiwan's FTC is not a paper tiger when it does act. In 2017 it fined Qualcomm NT$23.4 billion — the largest penalty in the commission's history — for abusing its dominance in the baseband chip market, later settling in August 2018 after Qualcomm paid NT$2.73 billion of that fine and agreed to a five-year package of behavioral commitments, including FRAND licensing to Taiwanese chipmakers and non-discriminatory treatment of local handset manufacturers. That case is the FTC's proof of concept: general competition law, applied with real teeth, can extract structural remedies without a bespoke statute naming platforms in advance.
The TFTC's own framing is instructive: ex-ante rules trade flexibility for speed, and speed for the risk of locking in obligations that make sense for 2023's App Store but not 2028's.
Why the Ex-Post Bet Is the Right One — For Now
The DMA's compliance machinery is heavy by design: gatekeepers file annual compliance reports, face bespoke technical specifications for interoperability, and — as this ruling shows — spend years litigating designation questions before the underlying conduct rules are even tested. Apple's own objection, however self-interested, points at something real: prescriptive ex-ante regimes are blunt instruments applied to fast-moving product architecture, and getting the obligations wrong (as the unresolved interoperability and anti-steering cases suggest may still happen) is expensive to unwind.
Taiwan's app market has the same duopoly structure as everywhere else — Apple and Google together still take a 15-30% cut on most transactions — but the island's small market size relative to the EU means a bespoke Taiwanese gatekeeper statute would carry heavy drafting and enforcement costs for comparatively little leverage over Cupertino or Mountain View's global product decisions. General competition law, enforced credibly as in the Qualcomm case, is the proportionate tool while harm remains speculative.
The Condition Attached
That bet only holds if the FTC keeps watching. If Korea's KFTC case against Google's Play Store incentive scheme produces a finding of exclusionary conduct, or if Taiwanese developers surface evidence of similar steering restrictions, the FTC should be ready to open its own Fair Trade Act inquiry rather than wait for Brussels or Seoul to do the work. Restraint is a legitimate regulatory choice; passivity is not.