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The regulation of electronic communications has been recently reformed in Europe. One striking feature of the review was to base most of the economic regulation – the so‐called significant market power regime – on antitrust principles. In particular, the regulated markets have to be defined according to competition law methodologies. This paper describes this approach and studies in detail the recently adopted Commission recommendation “on relevant markets susceptible to ex‐ante regulation”. The paper concludes with three policy recommendations. First, as regulation is more flexible and more complex, national regulators should co‐operate among themselves and national courts should only reform regulatory decisions in case of manifest error. Second, as regulation is not any more justified by the “original sin” of the previous monopolists, but by the inefficiency of antitrust to control market power, NRA should be cautious not to overly expand their intervention. Third, as ex ante market definitions are aligned on antirust principles, authorities should make sure that market definition is not a goal in itself but only a means to achieve the policy objectives of the sector‐specific regulation.

The attempt to establish a common European framework for core platforms' duties and responsibilities toward other actors in the digital environment is at the core of the recent scholarly debate surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal. In particular, the everlasting juxtaposition between the “data power” – as emerging from recent cases (Section 2) – that dominant tech companies enjoy and the concept of consumer sovereignty (Section 3) lies at the core of the proposal's attempt to identify digital core platforms as market gatekeepers. Accordingly, this chapter critically investigates the divide between power imbalance and consumer sovereignty in light of the architecture designed by the DMA, with a specific focus on its effectiveness in identifying gatekeepers' power drivers (Section 4). After highlighting the main critical aspects of the pertinent rules, opportunities for fruitful developments are then identified through the reframing of some of the notions considered in the proposal, and namely the role of “lock-in” effects and “data accumulation” (Section 5). Lastly, this chapter suggests that the DMA advancements – while desirable – are bound to be fragmentary in the absence of a wider appraisal of the nature of data power imbalance dynamics in the modern digital markets (Section 6).