EU Designates Booking.com as Gatekeeper, Temporarily Spares X/Twitter

The European Union's antitrust regulator has announced that it will designate Booking.com, a hotel and ticket booking website, as a gatekeeper in the EU market under the Digital Markets Act.

As a gatekeeper, Booking.com will be subject to stricter regulation and oversight to ensure fair competition in the EU market. If the company is found to have violated the Digital Markets Act, it could face fines of up to 20% of its global revenue from the previous year.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU's antitrust chief, stated that travelers will benefit from more choices and hotels will have more business opportunities.

The main issue with Booking.com is that it tends to prioritize hotels that offer higher commissions, which may result in higher costs for consumers.

Previously, the EU had designated Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and ByteDance as gatekeepers. Booking.com becomes the seventh company to be designated as a gatekeeper.

In reality, Booking.com should have been designated as a gatekeeper earlier, but the Digital Markets Act requires companies to notify the EU only when they have more than 45 million monthly active users and 10,000 annual active business users. Booking.com did not meet this threshold until this year.

However, Booking.com had anticipated a significant increase in global travelers after the pandemic and triggered the Digital Markets Act provisions on March 1. The company notified the EU and triggered the review process, which led to the EU's announcement two months later.

The EU has determined that Booking.com's core platform services constitute an important gateway between businesses and consumers, but it will not designate TikTok and X/Twitter as gatekeepers, as their advertising platforms are not considered critical gateways.

Notably, TikTok and X have already met the threshold in terms of monthly active users and annual active business users, but their market share is not high enough to warrant gatekeeper status, given that Google and Meta are still the dominant players in the advertising market.