UC Berkeley

This dissertation studies the diffusion of digital competition regulation through three linked papers. The first, “The Global Race to Rein in Big Tech,” systematically traces regulatory diffusion across Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia through a five-stage typology—announcement, expert report, draft legislation, public consultation, and enforcement. It documents how the EU’s Digital Markets Act has emerged as a global regulatory template, how developing countries have customized it with lower thresholds, broader scope, and higher penalties, and how the United States has begun pushing back against digital competition regulation abroad.The second paper, “Temu’s Antitrust Paradox,” examines the political economy of U.S. antitrust enforcement against Amazon at the moment Chinese e-commerce platforms —Temu and Shein— entered the American market. It argues that the emergence of aggressive foreign rivals has diluted the government’s market-power theory against Amazon while simultaneously reshaping the boundary between antitrust law, trade policy, and national security. The paper develops the concept of a “Temu Antitrust Paradox” to describe this dynamic and draws out its implications for the future of U.S. e-commerce antitrust. The third paper, “Antitrust in the Global AI Infrastructure Competition,” is a sector-specific study of competition in the cloud and AI infrastructure layer. Building on a comparative analysis of the United States, European Union, China, and Southeast Asia, it introduces “coordination rights” as an analytical framework and proposes a “developmental coordination model” for jurisdictions seeking to compete in, rather than merely regulate, the global AI infrastructure race. Across these three studies, two themes emerge. First, diffusion in digital regulation has become a high-velocity process in which draft legislation, enforcement experience, and political signals move across borders faster than traditional comparative-law frameworks can accommodate. Second, geopolitics is not a backdrop to this diffusion but a constitutive element of it: U.S.–China rivalry, European digital sovereignty, and the positioning of middle powers shape not only when regulation diffuses but what it looks like when it arrives. Taken together, the papers contribute a framework that treats digital competition regulation as a diffusion phenomenon, one in which legal form, industrial policy, and great-power competition are deeply intertwined.