Fit for Purpose, Unfit for Review: Why the DMA’s First Evaluation Could Never Find Failure
The first review of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) reads less like an evaluation than a wellness check performed by the patient’s proud parent. The pulse is strong. The color is good. Any lingering symptoms? Too early to tell.
On April 28, 2026, the European Commission published the review required under Article 53 and declared the DMA “fit for purpose.” The report credits the law with “a tangible positive impact” and sees no need to revise the list of core platform services. In the Commission’s telling, the machinery is working; where the evidence remains thin, time will supposedly fill the gaps.
I do not doubt the Commission’s sincerity. I doubt that the exercise could ever have produced a different result.
The DMA’s evaluative architecture is designed in a way that makes failure effectively impossible to demonstrate. Not because the Commission is uniquely stubborn or populated by self-serving sycophants. Rather, the regime’s foundational premises determine what counts as evidence in the first place. In a new white paper, I describe this phenomenon as autopoietic regulation: a system that reproduces its own assumptions rather than testing them. The DMA’s first review confirms that diagnosis precisely because it passes.