Users report costs with no evidence of benefits

European Union policymakers sold the Digital Markets Act (DMA) as a way to make digital markets “fair and contestable.” Two years into application, the verdict from Europe’s users is strikingly consistent: everyday experiences online are worse, not better. A 5,000‑person, 20‑country survey by Nextrade Group finds most Europeans report a degraded user experience since early 2024, with two‑thirds of Europeans saying they now need more clicks or more complex searches to find what they need. Among heavy searchers, 61% say a single search now takes up to 50% longer. Forty‑plus percent would even pay to get the pre‑DMA experience back, which is an extraordinary admission that a law pitched as pro‑consumer has imposed such tangible consumer harm. 

A second, independent survey from the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) confirms the pattern across Central and Eastern Europe: 39% of respondents say routine tasks online have become more cumbersome, 80% have never even heard of the DMA, and there is no evidence of lower prices, better privacy, or more “contestable” markets for users. The authors conclude bluntly that the DMA “has not achieved its intended impact” and worked against European consumers by adding “time-consuming friction.” This survey, conducted by Ipsos in July 2025, interviewed 3,500 consumers across seven countries: Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, with 500 respondents in each market. 

What changed for consumers under the DMA?

The simple truth is that the DMA forced platforms to fix what wasn’t broken by making changes to features that consumers already liked, by delaying the rollout of new and improved features that users wanted access to, and by creating new data security concerns. A few illustrative examples:

Search and travel: Google’s own compliance updates acknowledge over 20 search modifications in Europe, including removing useful flight features and reducing clickable map functionality. When Google tested a “ten blue links” hotel page with no maps and no structured listings to meet regulators’ guidance, users were less satisfied and hotels saw traffic drop by more than 10%. That test was halted after the negative user impact.

Devices and apps: Apple publicly warned that DMA obligations are delaying or denying EU users new features like Apple Intelligence, Live Translation for AirPods, iPhone‑to‑Mac screen mirroring, and some Maps upgrades; and that sideloading/alternative app stores and far‑reaching interoperability demands raise security and privacy risks for EU users. Press coverage and regulatory filings have corroborated those delays and the company’s push to revise the rules.

Personalization and integration: Consumers report less relevant search results, weaker map integrations, and poorer personalization in ads and video, consistent with the DMA’s strict limits on combining service data across a platform. In Nextrade’s survey, 35% notice worse map service quality, 33% say search results are less relevant, and 39% say ads are less relevant. Users also prefer many conveniences the DMA undercut: 59% favor going directly to apps rather than using choice screens, and 57% favor richer shopping result panels that regulators prohibit.

Data security concerns from data portability requirements: While the European Commission has pushed covered companies to loosen access requirements for third parties to use data portability APIs required under the DMA, one covered company reported that “over 75% of the applications they received for such data types corresponded to non-EU-based applications from data aggregators, who are mainly based in countries with EU adequacy decisions pursuant to the GDPR. In other words, business users or third parties that cannot, generally, access any type of personal data from data subjects located in the EU.”

These are not abstract trade‑offs. They are minutes lost and tasks abandoned. Europeans describe more friction, more prompts, and more hunting to complete everyday tasks. These outcomes are exactly the opposite of what good regulation should deliver.

The costs show up in consumers’ lives, too

Beyond the direct costs, de‑integration mandated by the DMA has measurable knock-on effects for Europe’s real economy that ultimately hit consumers. A comprehensive study by Cennamo, Kretschmer, Constantiou, and Garcés estimates up to €114 billion in annual revenue losses across EU service sectors, equal to about 0.64% of turnover, as platforms are forced to offer less personalized, less efficient tools to their business users. The study further estimates annual revenue losses per European worker up to €1,122 depending on the intensity of digital service use across sectors. Hospitality and retail sectors are singled out among the potential losers. Less efficient discovery and advertising means fewer deals found, fewer direct bookings, and higher customer‑acquisition costs that drive up consumer prices.

The Google travel example traces that causal chain in miniature: stripping structured flight and hotel modules to appease the DMA required users to click more times to find what they were looking for, reduced traffic to hotels, and made finding options harder. This created a lose‑lose scenario in which no one, except perhaps rival digital intermediaries not covered by the DMA, can credibly claim a win.

DMA mistakes punishing incumbents for consumer benefit

Well‑functioning digital services often rely on tight integration: maps embedded in results, cross‑service identity, and responsibly combined signals to surface what users really want fast. The DMA’s per‑se prohibitions treat many of those integrations as suspect by default. Even neutral observers warned that one‑size‑fits‑all bans risk overriding user preferences and reducing welfare. As Intereconomics put it during the first months of enforcement, the DMA represents a “policy reversal” away from evidence‑based case work toward rigid conduct rules that can undermine efficiency and innovation. That prediction looks prescient today as user‑experience metrics fall and product delays mount. 

Moreover, the DMA is a classic example of counterproductively adding regulation when Europe needs to reduce red tape in order to compete effectively on the global stage. As the Draghi Report noted, “the EU has developed few homegrown pan-EU digital platforms and no pan-EU platform is among the most visited in Europe. The Single Market is home today to only four of the fifty largest digital marketplaces worldwide, while the ten largest platforms serving EU citizens are owned by US (six) or Chinese (four) companies.” Europe’s self-defeating habit of adding to compliance burdens in response to its firms competing less effectively on the global stage explains why just one of the top 25 firms in the world is European despite Europe’s incredible human capital and large common market.

Critically, the consumer backlash is not ideological. Nextrade’s data show Europeans still use (and in many cases prefer) the very services DMA rules weakened; they just want them to work well. ECIPE’s cross‑country evidence shows no broad shift to alternative providers, meaning the DMA hasn’t created the “contestable” utopia promised, only more steps to use the same services. That is not what success looks like, and represents no quantifiable benefit for cost-benefit analysis purposes. 

European business users see costs without benefits

The impact of the DMA on European business users is strongly negative. A recent economic study found that the DMA is causing between €8.5B–€114B in annual EU business revenue losses from reduced personalization and impaired digital platform functionality post-DMA. €8.5B in lost European business revenue alone is attributed to the DMA’s impact on personalized advertisements. The effects don’t end there, per the study: “After the DMA, search visibility is increasingly routed through intermediaries at the expense of direct business listings and even dedicated ads. The click through rate of Google Hotel Ads decreased by 30% in regions affected by the DMA compared to unaffected regions during January – April 2024. Direct bookings through Google Hotel Ads decreased by 36%.” In addition, European businesses and startups are getting delayed access to the latest artificial intelligence tools, reducing their global competitiveness.

Lessons for other jurisdictions

The implementation of the DMA has left Europeans worse off and unhappy about changes to digital services. At the same time, it is difficult to identify any benefits to Europeans from the DMA that could potentially offset these recognized costs. One benefit that accrues to non-Europeans from the unfortunate experience of Europe with the DMA is that it can provide useful lessons for other jurisdictions considering sweeping digital regulations:

Don’t try to prescribe digital service design through regulation: Most features of digital services demonstrably help users, either on their own or when combined with other features. A digital service tends to be designed in a manner that maximizes the usefulness of the service to its users. Mandating particular designs will almost always make services worse for users in ways they recognize, and users, who are also voters in many jurisdictions, won’t be happy. Remember: users don’t want higher priced hotels that they cannot find on a map without numerous extra clicks.

Shift from ex‑ante rigidity to case‑by‑case remedies that are only applied where harm is proven and are subject to cost-benefit analysis: DMA implementation has created blanket mandates and prohibitions that are producing worse designs, security tradeoffs, and privacy costs without any clear consumer gains. Government-imposed obligations should only be created after a demonstrated market failure is adjudicated, and those obligations themselves should pass periodic cost-benefit analysis to justify continued government interference in the market.

Be honest about costs and who pays: The European Commission’s early assumption that DMA compliance would be nearly free has been proven false. If policy makers want high‑touch ex‑ante governance modeled on the DMA, they must recognize that billions in engineering and compliance costs will ultimately be paid for by their consumers and local business users.

The bottom line

If you set aside the rhetoric and read the user data, European consumers and startups dislike what the DMA has done to their daily lives online. Europeans are effectively paying more for intermediary services due to lost time. Their searches take longer. Their maps and shopping results are less useful. Their devices now get new features late, and some new features and devices may not get rolled out in Europe at all. Despite all that sacrifice, there is no clear evidence of lower prices or improved privacy, and no significant user shift to alternative providers. That makes the DMA, and any other similar approach, a policy failure by any practical metric.

The DMA’s current implementation has confused “imposing costs on incumbents” with “making consumers better off.” The two are not the same, and, in fact, tend to work at cross-purposes. A reset toward evidence‑based, user‑outcome‑driven enforcement is overdue in Europe. Until then, the message from Europe’s consumers to their own policy makers and policy makers in other jurisdictions considering emulating Europe’s example is plain: give users back the digital tools that worked.