During the Business Software Alliance’s TRANSFORM forum last week in Washington, DC, Jovita Neliupšienė, the European Union’s ambassador to the United States, joked that Brussels is “not deregulating but simplifying—so that if not a fifth grader, at least a sixth grader could do business in Europe.” The audience laughed, but for millions of EU consumers, the truth is exactly the opposite. Doing anything online in Europe rarely feels simple these days. The Digital Markets Act (DMA), introduced to create fairer, more open digital markets, was meant to make technology easier, safer, and more affordable. Yet an ECIPE report conducted across seven Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries suggests the DMA has brought neither the simplicity nor the consumer benefits its architects promised: services have become clunkier, privacy has turned into a paid feature, and small firms remain no more competitive than before.

Consumer Complaints

The consumer complaints captured in ECIPE’s study can be grouped into three broad categories that reveal how the DMA has failed to deliver on its promises:

1. Increased friction and lost functionality
2. Privacy and choice paradoxes
3. Stalled contestability and chilled innovation

Increased Friction and Lost Functionality

The DMA’s design-for-compliance model has added friction, slowed tasks, and degraded user experience, resulting in inconvenience for consumers. This friction is both functional (extra steps and degraded usability) and cognitive (confusion and decision fatigue).

For example:

• Everyday tasks have become more complicated. Although the DMA touted frictionless digital experiences for consumers, according to the report, nearly four in ten respondents said they now need more steps to complete simple online actions than before. One-third of these same respondents said that digital services feel more confusing post-DMA. For instance, consumers cited additional consent clicks, fragmented features, and intrusive choice screens.
• Per se rules have produced real impediments. The DMA treats designated gatekeepers under a default strict liability standard: conduct is banned automatically, without evidence of specific consumer harm. For example, rules against “self-preferencing” forced the removal of integrated modules—such as Google Maps previews or shopping snippets—from search results. Consumers told surveyors this made searches more time-consuming, while no evidence shows that rivals gained significant new traffic.
• More affordability and lower prices remain elusive. The European Commission’s rhetoric of “more competition, lower prices” doesn’t appear to have reached ordinary users. Across the CEE region, where digital adoption is high but competition awareness remains low, the report found little sign of cheaper or better value digital services following the DMA’s introduction. As the report noted, “the promise of better services at fairer prices thus rings hollow so far—improvements are either too subtle, too inconvenient, or too opaque for consumers to appreciate.”

Privacy and Choice Paradoxes

The DMA’s privacy and interoperability rules were meant to empower users, but in practice, they are hurting them.

For example:

• Consumers do not want to buy privacy. The DMA has forced platforms like Meta to introduce paid “ad-free” subscriptions, monetizing privacy as a premium feature. However, the report found that only a small minority of users are willing to pay for ad-free or data-minimized versions of services, while around two-thirds continue to exchange personal data for access to free platforms. As such, the DMA appears to have highly overestimated consumers’ willingness to pay for alleged extra privacy safeguards.
• Interoperability has brought security worries instead of more choices. The DMA mandates that operating systems enable greater interoperability for third parties as a way to encourage openness. Yet the report indicates that only a small share of users noticed these interoperability options, and among those who did, most expressed growing concern about cybersecurity and data protection.

Stalled Contestability and Chilled Innovation

While the DMA was intended to target gatekeepers, it overlooked how consumers actually behave. People have not switched to alternative platforms, European tech rivals have not grown, and innovation has chilled across the EU.

For example:

• Contestability has remained theoretical, and small businesses are still invisible online. The central promise of the DMA was to boost contestability and scale up European rivals. According to the report, around 70 percent of respondents still use Google Search multiple times a day, and more than 75 percent use Facebook daily. In other words, user behavior data still show traffic flowing overwhelmingly to well-known, larger brands.
• Innovation has taken a backseat, and Europe has become the “last-to-launch” market. Over the past two years, several high-profile services and features have arrived in the EU after other regions. As the ECIPE report noted, the launch of Meta’s Threads app in the EU was delayed several months amid uncertainty about data use. Additionally, Apple postponed the rollout of Apple Intelligence, citing DMA interoperability obligations.

Time to Reassess the DMA

Ambassador Jovita Neliupšienė’s quip about making business simple enough for a sixth grader captured the spirit Europe needs. Yet the DMA, in its current form, is anything but simple—for consumers or small firms. If Brussels is serious about its “simplification agenda,” it should start by reassessing the DMA: remove rules that add friction without value and measure success through consumer welfare, not compliance checklists.