On April 28, 2026, Argentina's Boletín Oficial published Decreto 284/2026, naming the leadership of the country's new National Competition Authority (Autoridad Nacional de la Competencia, or ANC). Eduardo Rodolfo Montamat was designated president of the Competition Defense Tribunal; Germán Augusto Zamorano was named Secretary for Economic Concentrations, the office that will vet mergers; and three other officials filled the remaining tribunal and conduct-enforcement seats. Each serves a five-year term. The decree completes the institutional buildout begun with Decreto 810/2025 in November 2025 and puts Argentina on track to switch to a mandatory ex-ante merger-control regime on November 17, 2026.
What is notable is what the decree does not do. Unlike the European Union, Brazil's pending proposals, or a growing roster of jurisdictions, Argentina is not building a Digital Markets Act-style ex-ante rulebook for large digital platforms. There is no list of designated "gatekeepers," no catalogue of per se prohibitions on self-preferencing or data combination, no bespoke regulator for app stores and marketplaces. Digital markets will continue to be policed the same way every other market is: through general, case-by-case competition enforcement under Law 27.442.
The case for an ex-ante digital rulebook
The strongest argument for the DMA model is real and worth stating plainly. Traditional antitrust is slow. Investigations into dominant platforms can run for years, by which time the market has tipped and the harm is locked in. The EU spent the better part of a decade litigating Google Shopping before the European Court of Justice finally upheld a €2.4 billion fine in September 2024. Ex-ante rules promise speed and certainty: instead of proving an abuse after the fact, the regulator imposes clear obligations up front, and gatekeepers must comply or pay. For users and smaller rivals facing entrenched network effects, that front-loaded clarity has genuine appeal.
Argentina has felt the limits of slow enforcement directly. The competition agency opened an investigation in 2021 into WhatsApp's controversial terms-of-service update, even issuing a precautionary measure against Meta. Yet in July 2025 it closed the case, finding insufficient evidence of an abuse of dominance and suggesting the grievance belonged in data-protection and consumer law, not antitrust. A DMA-style regime would have skipped that four-year detour and simply prohibited the conduct by rule.
Why Argentina's restraint is the proportionate call
And yet the WhatsApp episode also illustrates the deeper problem with ex-ante platform rules: the underlying complaint was about privacy and consumer consent, not market structure. Forcing it into a gatekeeper rulebook would have mislabeled a data-protection question as a competition one — exactly the category error the agency avoided. Proportionate regulation means matching the tool to the harm, and Argentina's framework keeps those tools distinct.
The DMA model also carries costs that its speed obscures. Ex-ante obligations are written for a snapshot of today's market and applied uniformly to firms with very different business models. They chill product integration and design experimentation, raise compliance costs that fall hardest on the next challenger rather than the incumbent, and hand regulators standing authority to micromanage features. Eighteen months into the DMA's enforcement, evidence that European consumers are materially better off remains thin, while complaints about degraded products — fragmented services, removed features, friction-laden consent screens — are not.
For an economy Argentina's size, the practical case for restraint is stronger still. Designating gatekeepers and running a parallel platform-regulation apparatus demands scarce institutional capacity. A young authority whose senior appointments are still provisional pending Senate confirmation is far better served concentrating that capacity on building credible, evidence-based enforcement than on standing up a speculative second regime modeled on a foreign market with different firms and different problems.
The reform that actually matters
The genuinely consequential change here is not digital at all. From November 17, 2026, transactions crossing the statutory thresholds in Law 27.442 must obtain clearance before closing, replacing a post-closing notification system that let deals complete and be reviewed afterward. This aligns Argentina with the global mainstream — the United States, the EU, and Brazil all use suspensory pre-merger review — and it captures digital acquisitions too, including the "killer acquisitions" of nascent rivals that worry platform critics most. Crucially, it does so through a structural, evidence-tested mechanism rather than a standing conduct code.
The shift is not costless. Suspensory review lengthens deal timelines, introduces gun-jumping risk, and demands that the new Economic Concentrations Secretariat under Zamorano clear filings quickly enough to avoid becoming a bottleneck on legitimate investment. Argentina's capital markets cannot afford a clearance queue that deters the very deal-making its recovery needs. The test for Montamat's tribunal will be whether it can deliver fast, predictable, reasoned decisions.
That is the right benchmark — and it is the one Argentina has chosen by declining the DMA path. Rather than locking tech markets into rules drafted for yesterday's competitive map, it is betting on an enforcement institution agile enough to address tomorrow's. If the ANC builds that credibility, restraint on ex-ante platform rules will look like wisdom, not a gap. If it does not, no rulebook would have saved it.