Social network X can evade the rigors of the digital markets law due to insufficient revenue

The EU executive body is close to completing its investigation into the activities of the platform formerly known as Twitter and is set to conclude that it does not fall within the scope of the digital markets law, Bloomberg writes, citing sources “familiar with the matter.”

Insiders also added that the European Commission’s decision could be published in October. Its essence will be that X is an “insufficiently powerful” service for business users and does not fit in with Alphabet’s Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.

The DMA provides for fines of 10 to 20% of global revenue for repeated breaches of fair competition rules by corporations, but tech giants must have a market capitalisation of 75 billion euros or an annual sales volume in the 27 EU countries of at least 7.5 billion euros ($8.3 billion).

In the EU, there must be at least 45 million monthly active users, and for businesses directly, at least 10,000 active accounts in the EU per year. It turns out that X does not meet these criteria, therefore the law does not apply to it.

However, this does not mean that European regulators will stop scrutinizing the social network’s activities. Another important reason to pay close attention to X is inappropriate and even dangerous content and the network’s inability to address it.

This issue, in particular, is related to a lawsuit in Brazil, where X is now banned. And earlier this week it became known that the country’s authorities withdrew 18.35 million reais ($3.3 million) from the bank accounts of X and Starlink to pay fines imposed by the Supreme Court.

The social network’s accounts in the country have since been unblocked, according to a court ruling on Friday, but the social network itself remains banned. However, the platform’s office in Brazil has been closed since August.