Leadership1 distinct publisher3 min readPublished
Opera spent more than two and a half years challenging the Commission's refusal to designate Edge, lost in its entirety, and now pays Microsoft's costs alongside its own. That is what the litigation route bought.
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The test Edge failed is a usage test, and the numbers the Commission put before the court were lopsided enough to survive review. Chrome took 59% of web page views across all devices in Europe in December 2022 against Edge's 5.8% [10], which is a ratio of about ten to one [17], and Chrome and Safari together accounted for 81% of those views [18]. Opera's answer was that reasoning of this kind is market share analysis wearing different clothes, which recital 23 of the regulation excludes [12], and the court dismissed the action in its entirety [3].
What makes the outcome instructive is that Opera's own standing was never the weak point. Microsoft, intervening on the Commission's side, described Opera as a material web browser and put it alongside Chrome and Firefox among the most popular Windows-compatible options [14], and annexes to the application showed Opera already listed on the Chrome and Safari choice screens in every member state in March and May 2024 [16]. Opera sat fifth on personal computers in Europe on StatCounter data running from June 2023 to June 2024, and stayed fifth on figures Microsoft itself reproduced through March 2025 [13]. The case turned on whether Edge was significant enough to regulate, not on whether Opera would have gained from the screen.
The price of finding that out is now on the record. The contested decision was adopted on 12 February 2024 and judgment came on 2 September 2026 [4][2], roughly thirty-one months later [19], and Opera bears its own costs plus those of the Commission and Microsoft [3]. Anyone modelling a challenge to a non-designation decision should use those two figures as the base case rather than the exception.
A skeptic would point at the trend and say the question reopens itself. Edge averaged 3.9% of European page views across 2020 to 2022 and was at 5.8% by December 2022 [11][10], a gain of 1.9 points [20], so keep that going and the threshold argument changes. The difficulty is procedural: Microsoft's escape came through a rebuttal filed under Article 3(5) and accepted at the outset, when the Commission agreed on 5 September 2023 that the presumptions had been manifestly called into question and opened investigation DMA.100028 [5][6]. Reopening that is the Commission's discretion, and the competitor route through the General Court has now been tried.
So the trade-off for anyone selling a browser or a search engine into Europe is between two spending lines. One is advocacy and litigation aimed at widening the perimeter of designation, which on this evidence runs on a multi-year clock and can end with three sets of costs [3][19]. The other is commercial placement on Windows, plus disciplined work on the screens designation has already produced, where the Article 6(3) prompt appears on first use for designated browsers [7] and the six-month compliance clock under Article 3(10) starts the moment a service is listed [8]. Note also whom those screens tend to reward: Microsoft argued that a choice screen would mainly help Google, since every material browser other than Edge ships with Google Search as its default [15]. The decision taken this quarter about which line to fund determines whether next year's European default share is something a company negotiated or something it waited for.
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
The General Court dismissed Opera Norway's challenge to the European Commission's refusal to designate Microsoft as a gatekeeper for Edge, leaving the browser outside the obligation that would have placed a choice screen in front of Windows users across the EU.
Judgment in Case T-357/24 was delivered in open court in Luxembourg on 2 September 2026 by the Eighth Chamber sitting with five judges, with M. van der Woude as President and D. Petrlik as Rapporteur.
The action was dismissed in its entirety, and Opera Norway AS was ordered to bear its own costs and to pay those incurred by the Commission and by Microsoft Corp., which intervened in support of the Commission.
On 12 February 2024 the Commission closed its market investigation covering three Microsoft services and concluded none crossed the threshold triggering regulatory duties; Article 1 of that decision states Microsoft is not designated as a gatekeeper for Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising. Opera challenged only the Edge portion.
Microsoft notified the Commission on 3 July 2023 that it met the Article 3(2) quantitative thresholds for Windows PC OS, Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising, and filed rebuttal arguments under Article 3(5) contending those three services did not satisfy Article 3(1) conditions.
On 5 September 2023 the Commission designated Microsoft a gatekeeper for Windows PC OS by Decision C(2023) 6106 final, and the same day, by Decision C(2023) 6078 final, accepted that Microsoft's arguments were substantiated enough to manifestly call the presumptions into question, opening market investigations under Articles 16(1) and 17(3); the web browser case was DMA.100028.
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1 article · September 2, 2026
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The chain here is unusually clean for a court story: chamber composition, C(2023) 6106 and 6078, DMA.100028, Article 1 of the February 2024 decision, the quoted line from Microsoft's statement in intervention. That is someone reading the file, not a press release. The ceiling is that one person read it — ppc.land is the only account, so any misreading of the recital 23 passage travels unchallenged, and the outlet's own text breaks off mid-sentence on the device-specific plea.
The prompt exists, just not on Edge
There is real-world uptake to point at, and it belongs to the other side of the case: the browser choice screen is already running for Chrome and Safari across all twenty-seven member states, with Opera on it. What the judgment leaves is a hole in that deployment — no first-run prompt for Edge on Windows, no six-month clock, no compliance work. Beyond that, the only usage measurement in the record dates from December 2022 and reached the court secondhand through the Commission's decision.
Filed as a docket item
If anything this is undersold. A five-judge chamber has just endorsed the proposition that a service can clear the DMA's quantitative thresholds, carry a high number of end users, and still escape designation because rivals are bigger — and it lands as a trade-press write-up with a percentage in the headline. The dek's jab about what the litigation route bought Opera is the closest the coverage comes to a claim, and the costs order behind it is plainly documented.
Every figure came from a party
Nobody in this record is disinterested. The page-view percentages come from the Commission decision under challenge; the StatCounter rankings that made Opera look significant were filed by Opera; the longer series that kept it in fifth place was reproduced by Microsoft, which was arguing the opposite conclusion. Microsoft's most useful sentence — that every material browser but Edge defaults to Google Search — was advocacy against a choice screen and ended up read as a concession that Opera would have been on it. Worth naming too that the outlet reporting all this covers search and advertising, whose largest player is the one Microsoft invoked.
Verifiable, unverified
Case T-357/24 is a public judgment, so everything here can be checked by anyone willing to open it — which is different from anyone having done so. Confidence rests on internal consistency and document-level specificity rather than corroboration, and it is held down by the unresolved questions: no party reaction, no appeal position, and a truncated account of the final plea.