4) Big Tech Antitrust Regulation — The DMA is Coming

4) Big Tech Antitrust Regulation -- The DMA is Coming

While high-profile Big Tech antitrust suits were filed in 2020, the focus in 2021 was on creating new competition-inspired regulatory regimes to bypass the time and hassle of traditional competition enforcement. The top story was the march of the EU’s Digital Market Act that will impose unprecedented mandates on “digital gatekeepers”. (A great table with the DMA’s 18 “Do’s and Don’ts” is found here.) The DMA is likely the biggest regulatory development in the digital platform economy. The top substantive disagreement was over the size threshold where the “gatekeeper” regime kicks in. Some argued that the DMA should only capture the very largest (basically the GAFA and Microsoft). But those who wanted to cast a wider net appear to have won out. Expect the regime to cover 20-to-30 platforms to start. And it will grow. In the US, there was also much talk of Big Tech antitrust reform, but the House Judiciary Committee’s four major antitrust bills are bogged down by Republican concerns over regulation adding to ideological bias. Not all new competition-inspired regulation moved slowly. Germany enacted a new regulatory regime and targeted the GAFA while Japan’s Ministry of Industry and Trade began regulating the country’s five largest platforms, including two domestic firms.

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