From Divergence to a Hybrid Regulatory Model for Digital Platforms Disruption: EU vs. Asean

This paper offers an original perspective on how jurisdictions with different economic priorities respond to the disruptive impact of digital platforms, focusing on the EU and ASEAN. It contrasts the EU’s hard-law, ex ante paradigm—embodied in the Digital Markets Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act—with ASEAN’s flexible, soft-law governance, centred on the ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025 and the ongoing Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) negotiations. The analysis examines Vietnam’s Draft Law on Digital Transformation, which introduces ambitious obligations for dominant platforms and stands as a regional hard-law experiment closer to the EU approach. Engaging with ASEAN’s increasingly active debate on platform regulation and the balance between growth and competition, the paper contributes analytical tools and policy insights for regional reform. Moving beyond the hard-law/soft-law divide, it advances a hybrid-progressive regulatory model for ASEAN that modulates the intensity of obligations according to platform scale and power and progressively strengthens national and regional enforcement capacities, fostering a more integrated, contestable, and investment-conducive ASEAN digital market. Research purpose: Comparatively assess the regulatory experiences of the EU and ASEAN – assuming Vietnam as bridging case – in order to identify the most suitable regulatory model for ASEAN’s digital markets, capable of ensuring market contestability while fostering innovation and the region’s economic growth. Research motivation: Digital platforms operate in globalised markets, creating competitive risks in every region of the world. A unified response or a convergence of regulatory models, as proposed in this research, helps reduce the risks of international regulatory fragmentation and enables emerging economies to establish contestable markets ab initio, thereby preventing the emergence of market concentration phenomena such as those experienced in Europe. Research design, approach, and method: The study adopts a qualitative comparative approach, analysing key European and ASEAN instruments (DMA, AI Act, ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025, DEFA, and Vietnam’s Draft Law), and integrates decisions of competition authorities and scholarly literature, in order to identify common challenges and to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of a hybrid and progressive regulatory model. Main findings: Building on this comparative insight, the paper advances an original proposal for a hybrid and progressive regulatory model. This model combines EU-style targeted ex ante obligations—such as on interoperability, data portability, and algorithmic accountability—with ASEAN’s flexible governance, allowing enforcement to be graduated and proportionate to platform scale and market impact. Such a calibrated framework can enhance market contestability ab initio, while safeguarding innovation, inclusiveness, and the growth potential of ASEAN’s digital economy. Practical/managerial implications: The proposed hybrid and progressive approach, inspired by the DMA’s “Brussels Effect”, allows ASEAN policymakers to draw on established EU regulatory standards without replicating their full rigidity, preserving a flexible and gradual coordination framework that respects the differences between the two economic and legal systems. At the same time, the model benefits businesses: large global platforms, already compliant with the DMA, can re-use the technical standards adopted for EU compliance, reducing costs and the risks of regulatory fragmentation; local SME platforms remain subject to proportionately less stringent obligations, while gaining from a level playing field that supports scalability and innovation.