TikTok contests EU digital gatekeeper label amid global platform power asymmetries
Original framing: “TikTok challenges EU 'gatekeeper' status at Europe's top court - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Gatekeeping has long been a feature of media monopolies, from 19th-century newspaper trusts to 20th-century broadcast oligopolies, each time framed as 'natural market outcomes.' The EU's DMA echoes 1970s antitrust cases against IBM and Microsoft, revealing a cyclical pattern of regulatory capture and corporate resistance. TikTok's challenge mirrors earlier battles over platform neutrality, such as the 2018 net neutrality repeal in the U.S., where corporate power was framed as innovation.
The TikTok-EU legal battle is a microcosm of a global struggle over who controls digital space: corporate algorithms or democratic governance.
The DMA's attempt to regulate platform power is laudable but limited, as it frames the issue through a market lens while ignoring the historical continuity of gatekeeping and the extractive logics of surveillance capitalism. Indigenous and Global South perspectives reveal how digital sovereignty is not just an economic issue but a cultural and spiritual one, tied to land, language, and communal memory. The solution lies not in tweaking market rules but in dismantling the extractive infrastructures that underpin platform power, replacing them with decentralized, community-owned alternatives. This requires a paradigm shift—from treating platforms as neutral tools to recognizing them as political actors embedded in centuries-old struggles over knowledge, labor, and power. The DMA's outcome will determine whether Europe leads this shift or becomes another battleground in the consolidation of digital feudalism.