Vietnam's Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) is racing a legislative clock. Under Government Resolution 141/NQ-CP, issued June 1, 2026, MOIT must finalize and submit a bill amending the Commerce Law, Competition Law, Foreign Trade Management Law, and Consumer Protection Law to the Cabinet by July 10, 2026, ahead of National Assembly consideration later this year. Buried inside that omnibus package are three articles — 10, 26, and 27 of the 2018 Competition Law — that would give Vietnam its first ex ante digital-platform regime, built in part on the architecture of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) filed formal comments with MOIT on June 20, and the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) followed with its own letter, both urging the ministry to drop the size-based provisions before the July 10 submission. The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) filed a parallel critique in February. All three make a similar argument: Vietnam is about to import a regulatory model that Europe itself is still struggling to make work.
What the draft actually does
Article 26 currently defines "substantial market power" through conventional factors — market share, financial strength, barriers to entry. The amendment adds digital-specific criteria: control over user data, network effects, integration across e-commerce ecosystems, and the use of algorithms or AI to coordinate prices or user behavior. Crucially, it adds a standalone test — an "intermediary digital platform's" market power can be established by size and user count alone, under Vietnam's electronic-transactions law, according to Vietnam's National Competition Commission.
Article 27 then lists prohibited conduct for platforms that clear that threshold: self-preferencing in rankings and algorithms, tying and bundling, obstruction of competing services, restrictions on multi-homing, and mandatory data-access obligations — six categories in total, according to a summary published on Dong Nai province's Industry and Trade portal. None of these require MOIT to first show the conduct actually harmed a competitor or consumer — the DMA's defining and most contested feature.
The steelman
MOIT's underlying diagnosis is not unreasonable. Vietnam's e-commerce and super-app platforms — Shopee, TikTok Shop, Grab, Zalo — increasingly bundle marketplace, payments, logistics, and messaging in ways that traditional market-share tests weren't built to capture. A platform can dominate a market segment with a small nominal "share" if it controls the ranking algorithm, the data pipeline, and the payment rail simultaneously. Vietnam's existing ex post toolkit, built around Law No. 23/2018/QH14, was drafted before super-apps existed and genuinely struggles to price that kind of structural power. Regulators worldwide — not just in Brussels — have reached similar conclusions about conventional antitrust's blind spots in platform markets, and dismissing that concern as regulatory fashion understates a real gap.
Why ex ante, size-based rules are the wrong fix
The problem is the remedy, not the diagnosis. Ex ante rules bind at the moment a platform crosses a size or user-count line, regardless of whether its ranking, bundling, or data practices ever hurt a rival or a consumer. That inverts the burden of proof that competition law is built on, and it captures conduct — like Meta's Instagram integration, which multiple studies cited by ICLE found expanded demand for competing photography apps rather than suppressing it — that is often procompetitive. The EU's own experience is the cautionary tale MOIT should be studying: DMA compliance uncertainty has already led Apple, Google, and Meta to delay or withhold AI features from EU users, a drag on innovation the regulation's architects did not intend and consumers did not ask for.
There's also a domestic wrinkle the DMA comparison obscures. Brussels' size thresholds were calibrated, rightly or wrongly, to catch a handful of large non-EU gatekeepers. Vietnam's user-count test would sweep in domestic champions too — Zalo, Tiki, MoMo — alongside Grab and TikTok, meaning the compliance burden falls as heavily on Vietnamese platforms competing to scale as on the foreign incumbents the rule is nominally aimed at. For an economy still building its own platform champions, that's a self-inflicted headwind, not just a foreign-investment one.
The proportionate path
ITIF's central ask — and the more persuasive one — isn't that Vietnam abandon digital-market oversight, but that it exhaust conduct-based, ex post enforcement under the existing Competition Law before layering size-triggered obligations on top of it. Vietnam's National Competition Commission has real investigative powers it has rarely tested against platform conduct; using them would generate an evidentiary record MOIT currently lacks. With the bill due at the Cabinet in weeks and a National Assembly vote expected by October, that window to swap ex ante triggers for a conduct standard is narrow but still open. Given the DMA's own uneven three years, Vietnam has little reason to adopt the untested parts of that model before Brussels has even finished debugging them.