Regulating Gatekeepers Across Borders: Apple-Meta Dispute And Limits Of International Competition Law

In April 2025, the European Commission (“EU”) issued its first ever fines under the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) against Apple for violating app store obligations and €200 million against Meta over its 'pay or consent' advertising model, which required European users to either accept personalised advertising or pay for ad-free access to Facebook and Instagram. The fines followed yearlong investigations into conduct of the companies on European markets. Apple condemned the measures as coercive and incompatible with its privacy architecture whereas Meta characterised them as discriminatory toward American firms.

What emerged was not simply another antitrust dispute but exposed a deeper structural problem in international corporate governance. Global technology companies and digital trade increasingly operate across borders but the legal systems regulating them remain territorial. Rules adopted to advance domestic objectives such as competition, privacy or market fairness can generate inter-state tension. Existing International law provides limited avenues to adjudicate disputes involving digital regulation which generates extra-territorial economic consequences.

When Platform Governance Became Regulatory Conflict

The conflict began in 2021 when Apple introduced the App Tracking Transparency (“ATT”), a feature requiring all third-party applications to seek affirmative user consent before tracking behaviour across other apps and websites. Although framed as a privacy measure, ATT had immediate competitive implications. Industry estimates suggested that reduced cross app tracking significantly affected Meta's advertising capabilities and imposed substantial revenue losses linked to lower targeting precision. Apple represented ATT as a privacy measure aiming to restore the control of personal data to users and limit cross platform tracking. Meta, however, argued that Apple invoked privacy as a justification to reshape competition and disproportionately constrain advertising dependent business models while regaining its control over app distribution and monetisation within the iOS ecosystem.

What transformed this corporate rivalry into a legal dispute of international significance was the entry of European regulation. The EU's DMA departed fundamentally from the ex-post model of competition to ex-ante model which involved law enforcement and designated the most systemically significant digital platforms as “gatekeepers”. These are entities whose market position warranted prospective and structural regulation. The obligations imposed on gatekeepers were specific and demanding. Gatekeepers could not preference their own services over third-party competitors. Among the most consequential of these obligations is Article 5(2) which governs the conditions under which gatekeepers may combine personal data across their designated core platform services. The provision requires that user consent to such combination be freely given and genuine. Critically, it prohibits gatekeepers from conditioning access to their services on that consent but a user who declines must still be offered a functionally “less personalized but equivalent alternative”. It was the application of this provision that produced the Commission's first financial penalties under the Act.

The Long Arm of the DMA

What the DMA fines exposed, beyond the specific non-compliance findings against Apple and Meta, was a deeper question of international law: on what basis does the EU exercise regulatory authority over corporations incorporated, headquartered and principally governed outside its territory?

The legal answer lies in the “Effects Doctrine”, a principle of prescriptive jurisdiction holding that a state may regulate conduct occurring outside its territory when that conduct produces substantial and direct effects within it. The doctrine originated in United States v. Aluminium Company of America (Alcoa), decided by the Second Circuit in 1945, in which the court held that a Canadian corporation could be subject to the Sherman Act for participating in a global market-sharing agreement whose effects were felt on American commerce.

However, EU jurisdiction is not unlawful per se. Although, the effects doctrine provides a recognised basis for regulating foreign conduct that produces results within domestic territory, the difficulty emerges at the point of coordination. Platforms such as Apple and Meta operate though integrated infrastructures, shared architecture and business models that is geographically spread and as a result, compliance with one regulatory regime often affects operations elsewhere. This dynamic has been described by Anu Bradford as the “Brussels Effect” - the ability of EU regulation to shape global corporate conduct not through international agreement, but because firms frequently choose uniform compliance over fragmented systems. Regulation enacted for Europe can therefore influence users, products and commercial practices far beyond Europe.

What makes this more than a compliance inconvenience is what follows from it. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Nigeria have already adopted rules emulating aspects of the DMA, while discussions and proposals on digital competition regulation have emerged in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand and Turkey. The DMA, enacted by one legislature, is quietly becoming the world's default framework for digital market governance. As Drewes and Kirk observe, the concern is not whether extraterritorial regulatory consequences are impermissible, but whether unilateral expansion of this kind can remain legitimate in the absence of institutional coordination.

Overlapping Regulation and the Burden of Coordination

The significance of the DMA dispute lies not in the existence of overlapping regulation, but in the absence of any institution capable of managing it. Once the EU imposed binding obligations on Apple and Meta, compliance ceased to be a matter of satisfying a single regulator and the same firms remained subject to parallel legal expectations elsewhere. International law permits these concurrent exercises of authority, yet offers no neutral mechanism through which their cumulative consequences can be assessed, coordinated or resolved.

Apple illustrated this problem in concrete terms. Within the EU, the DMA imposes ex-ante obligations directed at platforms access, interoperability and app distribution. In the United States, Apple remains subject to ongoing antitrust litigation brought by the Department of Justice under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which challenges aspects of the same ecosystem through a different legal framework and remedial structure. In the United Kingdom, the Competition and Markets Authority has separately exercised powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to assess Apple's mobile platform under a distinct statutory model. The same platform architecture is therefore evaluated under multiple regulatory standards that are not designed to interact with one another. The result is overlapping compliance burdens imposed by uncoordinated regulators, producing legal uncertainty that no single regulator is responsible for resolving and no court has jurisdiction to address holistically.

Existing Mechanisms Offer Limited Coordination

International law is not entirely silent on regulatory coordination. But the mechanisms it offers are, on examination, insufficient for a dispute of this character. Scholarship on global antitrust governance has long identified what Gerber terms the “unilateral jurisdiction” problem, whereby economically influential jurisdiction externalize domestic regulation in the absence of a multilateral framework, producing what he describes as a fragmented patchwork that undermines predictability in global markets.

Competition cooperation agreements such as the EU-US Bilateral Competition Agreements, provide a framework for information sharing and comity between regulators. A regulator that disagrees with its counterpart's approach is not required to defer to it, and in practice frequently does not. Mutual comity, a principle that each state should give respectful weight to the regulatory interests of others is similarly voluntary. Each authority retains full discretion under its domestic legal framework operating a voluntary mechanism rather than an enforceable rule.

This limitation is not confined to bilateral cooperation agreements. At the multilateral level, competition governance similarly relies on institutional coordination rather than legal determination. The most prominent example is the International Competition Network (“ICN”) which is a global forum that develops non-binding best practices and promotes convergence in across jurisdictions. While it plays an important role in facilitating dialogue among authorities, but exercise no adjudicatory or enforcement functions. Its output depends entirely on voluntary adoption by national regulators. A similar structure characterises the work of the OECD Competition Committee, which has contributed significantly to conceptual alignment but remains non-binding and establishes no mechanism for resolving disputes between states or regulators.

The World Trade Organization's (“WTO”) own attempt to move beyond this voluntary coordination model provides most instructive precedent. Through the Working Group on the Interaction between Trade and Competition Policy, inaugurated at the Singapore Ministerial in 1996, the WTO sought to develop a framework for competition coordination with genuine multilateral reach. It collapsed in 2003 for want of political consensus and antitrust law was formally removed from the WTO work programme.

Taken together, these instruments demonstrate that while competition governance is increasingly transnational in practice, it remains institutionally fragmented in structure.

Rethinking Competition Governance

The Apple-Meta dispute may ultimately be remembered less for the amounts of fines imposed than for the institutional question it exposed. Digital markets are increasingly governed across jurisdiction, yet competition enforcement remains organised through domestic legal systems connected by voluntary cooperation. Rather than moving toward centralized regulation of digital markets, a more credible next step may be for states to being considering a structured network capable of addressing jurisdictions, standing and coordination in cross-border competition disputes. The challenge is no longer whether competition law can reach global markets. It is whether international competition governance can evolve beyond coordination alone.

Author is a final year Law student at School of Law, NMIMS University, Mumbai. Views are personal.