Asia-Pacific at the Crossroads

The Digital Economy’s Pivotal Moment

The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region has become one of the most consequential arenas in the global digital policy debates surrounding emerging technology markets and curated online marketplaces (COMs), including digital platforms. Home to some of the world’s fastest-growing internet populations and mobile device penetration ecosystems,1 the regulatory choices made across APAC will profoundly shape whether the region becomes a beacon for innovation-friendly governance or whether it imports the restrictive ex-ante frameworks that have hobbled other jurisdictions in this “race to regulate” technology.

The stakes are particularly high for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the fight between policymakers and large incumbents to “correct” competition in these markets. Moreover, the divergence in approach between jurisdictions has become starker.

As of July 2026, APAC digital competition governance frameworks are presenting four distinct risk profiles:

• Those that have moved into active enforcement of ex-ante styled rules or approaches with a preexisting, sustained enforcement focus that tends to single out foreign—especially U.S.-based—firms (very high risk level)
• Those that have moved into active enforcement of ex-ante styled rules or approaches without the backdrop of sustained targeting of certain foreign entities (high risk level)
• Those that are advancing legislation but have not yet enacted it (medium risk level)
• Those where geopolitical and trade pressures have constrained the most aggressive proposals (low risk level)

No two countries present the same picture, and the Republic of Korea stands alone as presenting a very high-risk level.

This brief examines the regulatory trajectories of 11 jurisdictions across the APAC region, highlighting the critical risks posed by DMA-styled approaches, including the unintended consequences to user experiences and intellectual property (IP) protections for developers. The brief will then explain how choices made in these individual markets may have unintended consequences for the global digital economy far beyond just the region.

Before examining individual jurisdictions, it is worth grounding this analysis in what platforms actually provide and what is put at risk when regulation disrupts them. Platforms provide three foundational advantages to the MSMEs and independent developers who build on them.

Platforms dramatically reduce overhead costs. Platforms act as data stewards, handling data governance, enforcing terms of service, and building the operational backbone of a compliant digital product that would otherwise require legal, technical, and administrative resources that small developers do not have.	Platforms provide instantaneous consumer trust. System-wide cybersecurity screening, fraud detection, and malware prevention create a layer of assurance that no individual developer could replicate and that users rely on without thinking about it.	Platforms enable cost-effective access to a global market. By vetting distribution channels and protecting against counterfeiting, cloning, and IP infringement, they allow an MSME in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe to reach hundreds of millions of users with confidence that their IP is well protected.

These are not incidental features of COMs; they are structural conditions that make the digital economy global.

---

Asia-Pacific Digital Platform Regulatory Snapshot

A Better Path Forward: Recommendations for APAC Policymakers

The evidence assembled above does not counsel regulatory passivity. Platform conduct can and sometimes does harm competition, and policymakers are right to keep watch. What the European experience shows is that the design of the response matters as much as the decision to respond, and that poorly calibrated ex-ante rules fall hardest on the small developers they are meant to protect. ACT offers the following principles to help APAC governments pursue genuine competition while preserving the platform functions that MSMEs depend on:

Begin with evidence of actual harm rather than presumed harm. The most durable competition policy continuously looks for demonstrated injury in the specific market at issue and pairs that finding with swift, proportionate remedies. An ex-post posture, grounded in conduct that has actually occurred, avoids freezing fast-moving markets into a template that is outdated within months of its adoption.

Use existing competition law before building an ex-ante regime. As the profiles show, authorities from Australia to India to Indonesia have reached platform conduct under the laws already on their books. Where existing law already does the work, layering a new designation regime on top of it adds duplication, cost, and uncertainty without filling a demonstrated gap.

Tie any designation to genuine market power and durable gatekeeper characteristics. A regime that designates platforms on the basis of low, population-based user thresholds, or without any finding of market power in a defined market, will sweep in firms that serve small businesses rather than constrain them. Thresholds should reflect demonstrated dominance, not raw reach.

Preserve the platform functions that small developers cannot replicate on their own. Effective frameworks protect the ability of platforms to vet third-party stores and distribution channels for IP infringement, counterfeiting, and malware, to screen the ecosystem for fraud and abuse, and to hold every participant to enforceable terms of service that govern how data is collected, used, and shared. Mandates that force fragmented distribution or compel data sharing without preserving these safeguards do not free small developers. They shift risk and cost onto the firms least able to bear them.

Protect the inter-platform competition that gives MSMEs their leverage. The rivalry among platforms for developer business, on revenue share, developer tools, payments, and reach, is itself a powerful procompetitive force. Rules that push every platform into the same regulated posture blunt that rivalry and weaken, rather than strengthen, the bargaining position of the small firms the rules claim to help.

Proceed with deliberate process and proportionality, and resist mission creep. Obligations should be sequenced, tested against local market conditions, and confined to the services for which an evidentiary record exists. Extending platform rules into adjacent markets such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing, before any harm has been shown, repeats the open-ended drift that has generated so much uncertainty elsewhere. Frameworks should also avoid discriminatory designs that single out foreign firms, which invite the trade friction that small exporters are least able to weather.

Conclusion

The APAC is not a uniform policy landscape, and it should not be treated as one. What this brief has documented across 11 jurisdictions is something more specific and more consequential than a general trend toward digital regulation: it is a region in the middle of choosing, in real time, whether it will build a digital economy on evidence or on borrowed frameworks it did not design.

The costs of getting that choice wrong are materializing:

The Republic of Korea’s smaller sellers are already navigating the market deterrent effect of compounding enforcement uncertainty.
Vietnam’s developers face a compliance architecture built for platforms at vastly greater scale than their businesses will ever reach.

Australia’s startup community is absorbing the early tremors of a litigation and legislative environment whose final shape remains undecided.

Across every jurisdiction where DMA-style obligations have taken root or are advancing, the bill is being paid not by the large incumbents the rules were designed to regulate but by the MSMEs who depend on stable platform ecosystems to access users, manage distribution, and grow.

APAC policymakers have an opportunity that their European counterparts missed: the chance to see the DMA’s real-world consequences for competitiveness, for the growth and job creation of startups and MSMEs, and for the experience and satisfaction of consumers and enterprises, and choose differently. That means anchoring market failure analysis in local economic conditions, protecting the IP vetting and security capacities that developers depend on, and ensuring that any designation frameworks are proportionate to actual gatekeeper characteristics, not drafted broadly enough to capture platforms that serve small businesses rather than constrain them. ACT will continue to engage with policymakers across the APAC region to advocate for regulatory frameworks that protect genuine competition, safeguard IP, and above all, support the small technology companies and developers whose creativity and ambition are the true engine of the digital economy.