TikTok Shop's rollout across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany, France and Italy through 2025 has reopened a question that European policymakers thought they had punted: should social media platforms be allowed to operate integrated marketplaces at all? A growing chorus of MEPs, traditional retailers and consumer groups now point to Indonesia, which in 2023 simply banned the model, and ask whether the European Union should follow.
That instinct is understandable, but it is the wrong lesson to draw. The EU already has two of the most ambitious digital rulebooks in the world — the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — specifically designed to police the harms that integrated social commerce can create. Imposing structural separation before those tools have been used in anger would be a policy own-goal: it would entrench Amazon and Alibaba's AliExpress, kneecap one of the few non-European challengers that has actually expanded consumer choice, and signal to global investors that Brussels treats every new business model as guilty until proven innocent.
What Indonesia actually did — and what it cost
Jakarta's Trade Regulation No. 31 of 2023 prohibited social media platforms from hosting direct transactions, forcing TikTok Shop offline in October 2023 within days of the rule taking effect. The official rationale was protecting small traditional merchants from predatory pricing and what officials described as cross-border dumping.
The outcome was less tidy than the headline. TikTok returned to the Indonesian market in December 2023 by acquiring a controlling stake in Tokopedia, GoTo's e-commerce arm, which effectively re-created the integrated experience under a different corporate wrapper. Local sellers who had built audiences on TikTok lost weeks of revenue, and the policy did little to address the underlying competitive concerns of offline retailers. As a model for the EU — a far larger, more procedurally constrained jurisdiction — it is a cautionary tale, not a template.
The DSA and DMA already cover the real harms
Most of the concerns animating the EU debate are not structural; they are behavioural, and the DSA was written precisely to address them. The Commission's formal proceedings against TikTok, opened in February 2024, already target the design of addictive feeds, the protection of minors, advertising transparency and researcher data access — the exact mechanisms through which integrated commerce could harm consumers. A second probe, launched in April 2024 over the TikTok Lite "Task and Reward" programme, prompted TikTok to withdraw the rewards feature in the EU within weeks. The DSA, in other words, is working as designed: it is forcing behavioural change without dismantling the product.
The DMA layer adds further constraints. ByteDance was designated a gatekeeper in September 2023, which means TikTok is already obliged to allow business users to communicate offers off-platform, to refrain from self-preferencing its own services, and to give regulators and rivals meaningful interoperability and data access. If TikTok Shop were found to be giving its own listings preferential ranking in the feed, Article 6(5) of the DMA already prohibits that — no new law required.
Forced separation would protect incumbents, not consumers
European retail e-commerce is dominated by a small number of very large players, with Amazon alone accounting for a substantial share of online retail in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. TikTok Shop is, for the moment, one of the few entrants with both the audience and the logistics ambition to challenge that concentration. A rule that forced users to leave the app and visit a separate checkout would not eliminate the network effects that worry critics; it would simply hand the resulting friction tax to incumbents who already own the default shopping habit.
It would also disproportionately hurt the small European sellers the rule is nominally meant to protect. Independent reporting on TikTok Shop UK — which launched in 2021 and remains the platform's most mature European market — has consistently noted that small and mid-sized merchants, particularly in beauty, fashion and home goods, have used the integrated funnel to scale without the marketing budgets demanded by Meta or Google. Breaking that funnel is not a neutral act.
A proportionate path forward
None of this means TikTok Shop should be left alone. The integration of recommender systems with commercial conversion creates real risks — manipulative design, opaque sponsored content, counterfeits, harms to minors — that deserve regulatory teeth. But the right response is to use the teeth Brussels has already grown:
- Finish the DSA proceedings. The Commission should bring its February 2024 case to a clear conclusion, with binding remedies on dark patterns, minor protection and ad transparency, before legislating a new structural fix.
- Enforce DMA Article 6 rigorously. If self-preferencing or anti-steering practices are happening inside TikTok Shop, the existing rules already prohibit them — what is needed is enforcement capacity, not new statutes.
- Apply consumer law uniformly. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the new product safety regime (GPSR) apply to social commerce just as they do to Amazon. Coordinated enforcement by national authorities would close most counterfeit and disclosure gaps.
- Reserve structural remedies for proven failure. Forced unbundling is the most invasive tool in the antitrust kit. It should be a last resort after behavioural remedies have demonstrably failed — not a first move dressed up as precaution.
Europe has spent a decade building a sophisticated, layered regulatory architecture for digital markets. The temptation to short-circuit that architecture with a blunt Indonesia-style ban is precisely the kind of reflex the DSA and DMA were meant to make unnecessary. If the EU wants to be taken seriously as the world's standard-setter for digital regulation, it should trust its own rulebook before reaching for the scissors.