Edge Escapes DMA Gatekeeper Status at 5.8% Share

A Rival's Case for Naming Edge a DMA Gatekeeper Has Failed

The General Court of the European Union dismissed in full Opera Norway's legal challenge seeking to force the European Commission to designate Microsoft Edge as a gatekeeper service under the Digital Markets Act. Case T-357/24, decided on 2 September 2026, upheld the Commission's February 2024 decision that Edge does not hold an important position as a gateway under Article 3(1)(b) of the DMA, even though Edge met the DMA's quantitative user-count and revenue thresholds that trigger the presumption in the first place.

Microsoft intervened in the case in support of the Commission, and the ruling is a defeat specifically for Opera, since Opera was the party that stood to gain if Edge had been folded into the DMA's strictest compliance regime, which would have forced Microsoft to open Edge to the same interoperability and anti-self-preferencing obligations that already apply to Chrome and Safari's parent companies.

Why the Court Rejected Opera's Ecosystem and Blink Arguments

Opera built its case on two arguments beyond raw market share. First, that Microsoft's ecosystem leverage, Windows pre-installation, default-browser status, and preferential access to Bing Chat, made Edge an important gateway regardless of its usage numbers. Second, that Microsoft's role in the open-source Blink rendering engine gave it latent control it could exercise against rivals at any time.

The court rejected both arguments. On ecosystem leverage, judges wrote that the DMA measures the benefit an ecosystem actually confers on a service, and found Edge's usage remained far below Chrome's despite every one of Microsoft's promotional practices. On Blink, the court held that changes to the engine require approval from Chromium's own governing administrators, so Microsoft lacks the kind of autonomous control Opera's argument required, and degrading Blink's speed or reliability would only reproduce the problem Microsoft solved by switching engines to it in the first place.

The Numbers the Judges Actually Used

The court's reasoning rests on comparative browser-usage figures the Commission had already gathered for its 2024 decision, and the numbers are stark enough that the judgment treats them as decisive on their own.

Even on the narrower Windows-only measure, where Edge's default-install advantage should show up most, Chrome still led by roughly two to one. The court's point was that scale small relative to rivals concretely rebuts the DMA's Article 3(2)(b) presumption.

This Sets a Real Bar for the Next Rival-Led Challenge

This is the first time a rival company, rather than a regulator or the designated gatekeeper itself, has taken a DMA non-designation decision to court and lost. Every prior gatekeeper ruling the Journal has covered involved a company challenging its own designation. Here, Opera tried the opposite move, asking the court to designate a competitor's product against the Commission's own finding.

That direction of challenge now carries a real evidentiary bar: a plaintiff needs usage numbers that clear a rival's share by a wide margin, on both the EU-wide and platform-specific measure a court will examine. Any browser maker or search-engine challenger weighing a similar case against a bigger rival's product now knows a concrete evidentiary floor to clear.

What an EU Operator Should Track From Here

Opera has two months and ten days from notification of the judgment to appeal points of law to the Court of Justice, the DMA's final court of appeal, so this is not necessarily the end of the case. Until an appeal is filed and decided, Edge stays outside the DMA's gatekeeper obligations, meaning Microsoft faces no interoperability, no anti-self-preferencing, and no data-portability duties on Edge that Chrome's and Safari's parent companies already carry.

For any EU business that distributes through, advertises on, or competes against Edge, that status is now judicially confirmed, at least while Case T-357/24 stands. The more durable signal is the evidentiary standard itself: a business planning to petition the Commission or the courts over a rival's market position should expect judges to demand the same kind of granular, platform-specific usage data this judgment relied on.

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