Gatekeeper or Strategic Market Status? Defining who is subject to big tech regulation

The European Commission and the UK’s CMA are taking different approaches to identifying which big tech firms should be regulated. Does either offer a better template for regulating big tech companies?

The European Union and the United Kingdom are taking different approaches to defining the “big tech” companies to be subject to regulation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and by the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) respectively. Both are taking at least one step away from traditional market definition process and dominance analysis used in the ex ante regulation of electronic communications markets and in competition law. In this issue of Hexagon, we compare the two approaches and assesses whether one is likely to lead to better outcomes than the other.