The EU law that designates large platforms as gatekeepers and sets obligations for competition, data use and consent, including the personalized-ads consent basis Meta reworked in 2025 and 2026.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is EU legislation that designates the largest online platforms as 'gatekeepers' and imposes specific obligations on them around competition, data use and user consent.
In April 2025, the European Commission found Meta's consent-or-pay model non-compliant with DMA gatekeeper obligations and fined the company. Meta committed to a new binary choice between full personalization and a reduced-personalization, reduced-data option on December 8, 2025, rolling it out from January 2026.
The Commission has said it is monitoring uptake and impact of the new choice. Fines of up to 5% of global daily turnover remain possible if the model is later found non-compliant again.
The DMA is the enforcement track behind the January 2026 personalized-ads consent changes, separate from the TTPA political-ad ban landing in the same window. Advertisers who conflate the two misdiagnose which lever actually moved in their account.
