Regulation of electronic commerce in European Union law and regulatory proposals for Turkish law

The platform economy, situated at the centre of digital transformation, renders conventional legal mechanisms ineffective due to network effects, data-driven market power, and its cross-border character, thereby exacerbating the "pacing problem" wherein law struggles to keep up with technology. This study scrutinises the next-generation rules developed by the European Union through the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the light of regulation theory, subjecting them to a comparative evaluation with Turkish law. The study first examines the theoretical underpinnings of cyberlibertarianism, cyberpaternalism, and network communitarianism; alongside an assessment of the efficacy of diverse regulatory modalities within digital markets, including command and control, market-based mechanisms, consensus-based regulation, and regulation by contract and design. In this context, it is established that the DMA's ex-ante regulatory model, predicated on the gatekeeper concept to address the inadequacies of ex-post competition law intervention, and the DSA's risk-based, multi-layered supervisory architecture, which marks a paradigm shift from liability to accountability, constitute a hybrid regulatory approach. An examination of Turkish law reveals that, despite amendments to Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce and Law No. 5651, the approach remains largely fragmented, reactive, and confined to a command-and-control mechanism reliant upon rigid quantitative thresholds. The core argument of the thesis is that to ensure contestability and fundamental rights within digital markets, the Turkish legal regime must evolve from a framework based principally on prohibitions to a holistic model grounded in systemic risk management, algorithmic transparency, and regulation by design principles. Consequently, the study presents a concrete roadmap for reform through specific de lege ferenda proposals, incorporating mechanisms such as trusted flaggers, independent audits, and internal compliance units to facilitate this transformation.