How far should regulators go in dictating the basic designs of some of the most widely used tech products and services? The adoption of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force last week, amounts to a giant experiment in government micromanagement of everything from Apple’s App Store to the Google search engine and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services.

To comply with the Act, which aims to open up the most commonly used tech platforms and force greater user choice, the big tech companies have come up with a barrage of technical changes that they say will meet the new rules. It is now up to European regulators to comb through these and – where necessary – force further changes.