Ex Ante Platform Regulation in the European Union, the United Kingdom and Japan

Аннотация

Between 2022 and 2025 three major jurisdictions moved digital platform oversight from ex post competition enforcement to ex ante regulation of designated firms. The European Union's Digital Markets Act, the United Kingdom's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act share the premise that case-by-case antitrust enforcement is too slow to discipline entrenched gatekeepers, but they differ systematically in how obligations are set, how compliance is determined and how enforcement is escalated. This article develops a four-dimensional institutional framework – designation, obligation-setting, compliance-determination and escalation – and applies it to the three regimes on the public record to January 2025: the designation of seven gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, the first year of applicable obligations and the proceedings it produced, the commencement of the United Kingdom's regime and its first investigations, and the phased entry into force of the Japanese statute. Three findings emerge. First, the regimes converge on substantive obligations – anti-steering, self-preferencing, interoperability, data separation – while diverging sharply on procedure. Second, those procedural differences generate a trade-off between speed and legitimacy that each jurisdiction resolves differently. Third, the first compliance cycle suggests that where an obligation is behaviourally simple and verifiable, as in application distribution, it produces observable change quickly; where it is not, as in search and social layers, it produces contestation instead. The article argues that for smaller and middle-income jurisdictions the effective choice lies between building domestic designation capacity and free-riding on compliance changes induced elsewhere.