When Treasurer Jim Chalmers unveiled Australia's new Digital Competition Regime in December 2024, he framed it as the natural endpoint of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Digital Platform Services Inquiry — a five-year, ten-report investigation that wrapped up in early 2025. The architecture announced by Treasury is unmistakably influenced by the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA): an ex-ante framework under which the government would designate dominant platforms and impose binding obligations enforced by the ACCC. But the Australian model also departs from Brussels in important ways — and those departures will determine whether it becomes a case study in proportionate regulation or just a slower path to the same problems plaguing European enforcement.
What Canberra Is Actually Proposing
The proposed regime would empower Treasury to designate platforms that meet quantitative and qualitative thresholds of market power. Designation would not by itself impose obligations. Instead, the ACCC would develop service-specific codes of conduct tailored to particular digital services — starting with app marketplaces and ad tech, the two areas the ACCC's inquiry flagged as most acutely concentrated. Other services — search, social media, browsers — could be added later through subsequent code-making rounds.
The mandatory obligations under discussion track familiar ground for anyone who has read the DMA: prohibitions on self-preferencing, requirements for data portability and interoperability, restrictions on tying, and transparency duties around ranking and advertising. Treasury has also signalled support for stronger merger notification rules for designated firms and a dedicated dispute-resolution pathway for business users.
Where Australia's Approach Is Better Than the DMA
The most important design choice is the service-by-service code structure. The DMA, by contrast, applies a single list of roughly two dozen do's and don'ts to every designated 'core platform service' — whether that service is an app store, a messaging app, or a search engine. The result, as the European Commission's own implementation experience has shown, is a regime that is simultaneously over- and under-inclusive: identical rules force very different products into the same compliance template, and disputes over scope have dominated the first eighteen months of enforcement.
Australia's tailored-code approach is more honest about the fact that competitive harms in mobile app distribution look nothing like competitive harms in programmatic advertising. It also gives the ACCC — a regulator with a strong track record on evidence-led market studies — room to calibrate obligations to actual conduct rather than presumed categories. That is a meaningful improvement.
A second underrated feature is sequencing. By starting with app stores and ad tech, where the case for intervention is strongest and best-documented, Treasury avoids the temptation to regulate everything at once. The ACCC's Digital Advertising Services Inquiry (final report 2021) and its app marketplaces work product give the regulator unusually solid evidentiary footing in these two segments.
Where the Risks Lie
None of this means the regime is risk-free. Three concerns deserve attention from policymakers, businesses, and consumers alike.
1. Designation creep. Ex-ante regimes have a tendency to expand. The DMA started with six gatekeepers and seven core platform services; the European Commission has since opened multiple specification proceedings and is reportedly considering further designations. Australia should resist the temptation to designate firms simply because they are large. Genuine market power — durable, structurally entrenched, and unlikely to be eroded by entry — is the only justification for ex-ante intervention. Treasury's draft thresholds will need to be tight, transparent, and judicially reviewable.
2. Innovation chilling effects. Some of the most contested DMA obligations — particularly around sideloading, default settings, and integration of services — involve genuine trade-offs between competition and security, privacy, or product quality. Apple's compliance posture in the EU, however controversial, has surfaced real questions about how to operationalise interoperability without weakening platform integrity. Australia's codes should be drafted with explicit carve-outs for security and privacy, and with a fast mechanism for revising obligations that produce unintended harm.
3. Consumer welfare drift. The Australian competition framework is anchored in the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, whose touchstone is consumer benefit. Ex-ante platform regimes have a habit of drifting away from that anchor toward 'fairness' between businesses — a politically appealing but analytically slippery standard. The codes should require the ACCC to publish, for each obligation, the specific consumer-facing problem it is intended to solve and the evidence base for it.
The Bigger Picture
Australia is now the latest in a long line of jurisdictions — joining the EU, the UK with its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Japan's Smartphone Act, and pending proposals in Brazil and India — moving from after-the-fact antitrust enforcement to upfront regulation of designated platforms. That convergence is not coincidence: traditional competition law has struggled with the velocity and scale of digital markets. But convergence also means a growing patchwork of overlapping, occasionally contradictory rules that small developers and ad-tech vendors must navigate.
If Canberra wants its regime to advance both competition and innovation, it should commit to two things now: international interoperability with comparable regimes (so a developer's compliance work in the EU counts toward Australian obligations where the duties match) and a statutory review clause that forces an evidence-based reckoning with whether the regime is actually delivering measurable consumer benefits within five years.
Done well, Australia's tailored, sequenced approach could become the template that the DMA's authors wish they had drafted. Done badly, it will simply be a smaller version of the same problem. The choice is now in the drafting.