A Comparative Analysis of the EU Digital Markets Act and Korea’s Digital Platform Regulation

Korea’s Ex Post and Flexible Approach within the Global Trend of Digital Regulation

Digital platforms have become core infrastructure across search, app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, social networking services, and digital intermediation. They are no longer merely private services that connect consumers and businesses. Rather, they exert structural influence over data flows, advertising allocation, app distribution, app-store access, business-user conditions, and the consumer choice environment. In response to these developments, major jurisdictions have been reassessing whether existing competition law frameworks are sufficient to address platform bottlenecks and business dependency. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) are representative examples of this regulatory shift, and Korea’s digital platform regulation should also be examined within this broader international context.

The purpose of this report is not to present a defensive argument in a trade dispute. Rather, it explains that Korea’s digital platform regulation reflects a policy model that incorporates the global trend of platform regulation after the EU DMA while seeking to account for market openness and innovation through a more ex post and flexible enforcement structure. A key question in evaluating Korea’s regulatory approach is whether Korea is simply replicating the EU’s ex ante designation model, or whether it is developing a more flexible framework that evaluates actual conduct and competitive effects. This distinction is important because platform regulation increasingly operates not only as a matter of domestic competition policy, but also within an international environment shaped by market access, trade concerns, and regulatory transparency.

The EU DMA is a leading ex ante regulatory model designed to promote contestability and fairness in digital markets. Under the DMA, providers of core platform services that meet certain scale-related thresholds may be designated as “gatekeepers.” Once designated, they become subject to predefined obligations and prohibitions. The gatekeeper assessment relies on quantitative criteria such as EU turnover or market value, the number of monthly active end users, and the number of yearly active business users. This structure indicates that the DMA is designed around platform scale, user base, business-user dependency, and bottleneck functions, rather than around the identity of specific companies.

The DMA’s quantitative thresholds further illustrate this ex ante design. A platform provider may be presumed to have a significant impact on the EU internal market if it reaches annual EU turnover of at least EUR 7.5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or if its average market capitalization or equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year. It may also be presumed to operate an important gateway where the relevant core platform service has at least 45 million monthly active end users and 10,000 yearly active business users in the EU. These thresholds show that the DMA uses pre-defined scale and user-base indicators to identify gatekeepers before imposing conduct obligations.

The DMA’s implementation also reflects its ex ante character. The European Commission designates gatekeepers and core platform services under the DMA, and designated firms are subject to obligations or prohibitions concerning practices that may have anticompetitive effects, such as self-preferencing, tying, restrictions on user switching, limits on data access, and constraints on business-user conditions. This differs from traditional competition law enforcement, which generally assesses and remedies unlawful conduct after a case arises. The DMA instead imposes conduct rules in advance on platforms with certain structural market positions.

The DSA has a different regulatory focus. While the DMA addresses contestability in digital markets and the bottleneck power of gatekeepers, the DSA focuses on online safety and platform accountability. It separately identifies very large online platforms and very large online search engines and imposes enhanced obligations in areas such as illegal content moderation, transparency in advertising and recommender systems, systemic risk assessment, independent auditing, and data access. Accordingly, when comparing Korea’s platform regulation with EU law, the DMA provides a more appropriate point of comparison than the DSA, because Korea’s current platform policy debate is more directly related to market power and transactional fairness than to content and online safety regulation.

Korea’s digital platform regulation shares certain similarities with the DMA in that it addresses potentially anticompetitive conduct by large platforms. The Korea Fair Trade Commission has identified policy directions concerning six major service areas: intermediation, search, video, social networking services, operating systems, and advertising. It has also discussed four categories of potentially anticompetitive conduct: self-preferencing, tying, restrictions on multi-homing, and most-favored-nation requirements. In this respect, Korea’s policy debate overlaps with the DMA’s concern for contestability in digital markets.

At the same time, Korea’s regulatory discussion is not limited to competition concerns. It also addresses transactional fairness between platforms and business users. In particular, following payment settlement failures involving certain e-commerce platforms, issues such as settlement periods, separate management of seller proceeds, contract transparency, and protection of business users have become more prominent. For this reason, Korea’s approach can be understood as a hybrid model that combines DMA-style competition concerns with transactional fairness measures reflecting the characteristics of Korea’s platform ecosystem.

A central feature of Korea’s approach is that it has moved toward placing greater emphasis on ex post assessment and the use of existing competition and transaction-related legal frameworks, rather than simply adopting the EU DMA’s ex ante designation model. The KFTC initially considered an ex ante designation approach, but later explained that, after taking into account views from industry, experts, and relevant ministries, it adjusted its policy direction toward an ex post presumption model. In this framework, the regulatory focus remains on dominant platforms with substantial market influence, but the status and conduct of such platforms are considered in connection with actual violations, market influence, and competitive effects.

Korea’s policy discussion also contains certain numerical indicators, but they are used in a different regulatory context from the EU DMA. Whereas the DMA relies on scale and user-base thresholds to assess whether a platform may be designated as a gatekeeper, Korea’s policy direction uses service areas, types of conduct, market influence, and case-specific assessment to frame regulatory intervention. Policy discussions have also included excluding platforms below certain size thresholds, including platforms with annual revenue below KRW 4 trillion, in order to reduce regulatory burdens on startups and smaller firms. This suggests that Korea’s approach incorporates structured criteria, but places greater emphasis on actual conduct and competitive effects than on a strict ex ante designation framework.

The following table summarizes the core distinction between the two approaches.

This comparison shows that Korea’s approach differs from a strict ex ante designation model. Under the EU DMA, platforms that meet specified criteria may be designated in advance and become subject to conduct rules. By contrast, Korea’s discussion includes a framework that reviews actual conduct, market influence, competitive effects, and transactional imbalance on a case-by-case basis. Korea’s platform regulation has not yet crystallized into a single final legislative framework. Rather, it remains an evolving policy agenda involving potential amendments to the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act, the Large-Scale Distribution Business Act, and discussions on online platform fairness. Therefore, the Korean model should not be overstated. A more careful assessment is that, based on the current policy direction, Korea’s approach has been adjusted toward a framework that gives greater weight to ex post and flexible assessment than to the EU-style ex ante designation model.

In the broader international regulatory and trade context, Korea’s platform regulation should be explained less as a response to specific firms and more as a question of regulatory structure and enforcement principles. Digital service-related laws and policies may, in some cases, be perceived as discriminatory measures or unnecessary barriers to market access for foreign firms. For this reason, it is important that the purpose and enforcement design of the regulation be clearly articulated. The more enforcement is grounded in actual conduct, competitive effects, and market conditions, the more the framework may be understood as an institutional measure for competition and transactional fairness rather than as a trade barrier. In this respect, Korea’s ex post and case-specific approach may contribute to policy transparency and international credibility.

In conclusion, Korea’s digital platform regulation follows the global trend in digital market regulation that has accelerated after the EU DMA, while seeking not to simply replicate the EU’s ex ante designation model. Instead, it aims to reflect ex post assessment, the use of existing competition and transaction-related legal frameworks, and domestic market characteristics. The comparison above reinforces this distinction: the EU DMA relies on pre-defined scale and user-base thresholds to identify gatekeepers, while Korea’s current policy discussion places greater emphasis on service areas, types of conduct, market influence, and case-specific assessment. Korea’s policy discussion remains an evolving agenda rather than a single finalized legislative regime, and therefore requires careful assessment. Nonetheless, the current direction suggests that Korea’s platform regulation is better understood not as a framework for sanctioning individual companies, but as an institutional response that seeks to consider fairness, openness, transparency, and innovation in digital markets.

Korea’s digital platform regulation can be understood as a policy approach that incorporates the post-DMA global regulatory trend while placing greater emphasis on ex post and flexible assessment in order to consider fairness, openness, transparency, and innovation in digital markets.