Where the EU's Rule Stops

The DMA Is Not the World's Only Answer

The Digital Markets Act entered force on 1 November 2022 and its obligations became live on 7 March 2024, making the European Commission the first regulator to impose binding, ex-ante rules on mobile platform gatekeepers across an entire jurisdiction. Brussels set the frame. But three other jurisdictions — Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom — had each arrived at overlapping conclusions by different institutional routes, and each drew the boundary differently. Reading them against the DMA reveals not a global consensus but a set of partial convergences, each with its own gaps and its own enforcement teeth.

The DMA's starting logic is designation. Under Article 3, a company controlling a core platform service above quantitative thresholds — 45 million monthly end-users in the EU, 10,000 annual business users, a market capitalisation above €75 billion — becomes a gatekeeper and inherits a catalogue of obligations: interoperability, data separation, anti-steering prohibition removal, and third-party app distribution. The obligations are structural and permanent; they do not require the Commission to prove harm in a specific market before imposing them. That ex-ante design is the DMA's defining characteristic, and it is what separates it most sharply from the case-by-case competition-law tradition the other three jurisdictions began from.

Japan, Korea, the UK: Three Routes to a Similar Destination

Japan's approach is the most recent and the most explicitly sectoral. The Smartphone Software Competition Promotion Act ↗, enacted in June 2024 and due to take effect in 2025, targets operating systems with more than 40 million domestic users — a threshold that captures iOS and Android and no one else in the Japanese market. Its obligations track the DMA's in several respects: third-party app stores must be permitted, alternative payment systems must be allowed, and anti-steering rules must be loosened. The Japan Fair Trade Commission retains enforcement authority, which means the regime is administered by the existing competition regulator rather than a new body. Where Japan diverges from Brussels is in its treatment of sideloading: the Act requires Apple to permit third-party app store distribution but does not go as far as requiring Apple to allow direct, store-free installation of apps by users. Notarisation-style security review is contemplated as consistent with the Act, a carve-out Apple has already invoked in constructing its EU compliance architecture. The practical gap between Tokyo and Brussels may therefore be narrower in effect than in text — both allow Apple a gatekeeping role over what can be installed, only with a different licensing regime around it.

South Korea moved earliest. Its amendment to the Telecommunications Business Act, passed by the National Assembly in August 2021 and promulgated the following month, prohibited large app-market operators from requiring developers to use the platform's in-app purchase system as a condition of distribution. The Korea Communications Commission was charged with enforcement. The law was a direct response to Google's announcement that it would extend its billing-policy requirement — previously applied selectively — to all apps on Google Play in the Korean market. As drafted, the law addressed the specific conduct that prompted it: mandatory payment system tying. It did not impose interoperability obligations, did not address third-party stores, and did not create a designation mechanism. Its scope was therefore significantly narrower than either the DMA or Japan's Act. Google's response was to introduce a fee structure for third-party payment processors that critics argued preserved most of the economic effect of the original mandate; the KCC initiated an investigation, and the tension between the law's intent and Google's implementation remained unresolved into 2024. Korea demonstrated both the value of moving first — the 2021 law predated every other jurisdiction's binding rule — and the limitation of targeting a single conduct without a structural remedy.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority took the opposite methodological approach: investigation first, remedy later, before legislation was passed. The CMA's mobile ecosystems market study ↗, published in its final form in June 2022, ran to several hundred pages and examined Apple and Google's control over iOS and Android in forensic detail. It found that both companies held substantial market power in their respective mobile ecosystems, that the 30 percent commission on in-app purchases was not constrained by competitive pressure, that anti-steering rules harmed developers and consumers, and that Apple's WebKit restriction — requiring all iOS browsers to use Apple's own rendering engine — stifled browser competition. The CMA recommended a bespoke regulatory regime with ex-ante powers and referred the matter to Parliament. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act received Royal Assent in May 2024, establishing a Strategic Market Status designation process that the CMA can now use to impose conduct requirements on individual firms. As of mid-2025 the CMA had opened SMS investigations into Apple and Google, but binding obligations had not yet been imposed. The UK is, in structural terms, closest to the DMA's ex-ante philosophy, but it is running roughly eighteen months behind Brussels in operational effect, and it is operating firm by firm rather than through a published obligations catalogue that applies to all designated gatekeepers identically.

What the Divergences Cost

The divergences are not merely procedural. They produce real asymmetries. A developer distributing a paid app across all four jurisdictions faces a commission environment shaped differently in each. In the EU, the DMA requires Apple to permit alternative app stores and alternative payment processors, though Apple's Core Technology Fee — €0.50 per install beyond one million annually — restructures rather than eliminates the cost of scale. In Japan, similar obligations are incoming but the implementation details, including any analogue to the CTF, remain to be tested. In Korea, the law targets the payment tying without addressing the distribution monopoly, so a developer can process payments outside Google Play but still cannot distribute outside it. In the UK, the regime exists but binding conduct requirements on Apple and Google are not yet in place; developers operating there remain subject to the pre-DMA status quo while the SMS investigations run their course.

The Commission's gatekeeper model assumes that naming the company and publishing the obligation list produces compliance pressure faster than case-by-case investigation. Japan's sectoral statute is architecturally similar but gives more discretion to the regulator in determining what counts as a compliant implementation. Korea's amendment is a targeted prohibition with limited structural reach. The UK's new regime in principle matches the DMA's ambition but is younger and has published no binding obligations yet. None of the three produces an outcome identical to the DMA's, and none is coordinated with Brussels in a way that prevents platform operators from offering differentiated compliance responses in each market.

That fragmentation has a cost that falls on developers first. A studio building for iOS must today maintain awareness of four distinct regulatory regimes governing the same commercial relationship — the one with Apple's App Store — each at a different stage of implementation and each with different enforcement bodies. The DMA is the most mature and the most structurally ambitious. But it stops at the EU border, and on the other side of that border, the rules are still being written.