Digital Sovereignty, Economic Ideas, and the Struggle over the Digital Markets

Digital market regulations respond to technological changes and global dynamics, but also to how political actors shape markets. Focusing on the Digital Markets Act, this article explains the EU’s marketcraft as the result of a struggle in the EU’s policy field between political actors promoting competing economic ideas in a rapidly evolving technological and geopolitical context. We argue that significant discursive and policy change in digital market governance has occurred because of shifting coalitions between three constellations of actors, which we call market correctors, market-busters, and market-directors. Tracking the ongoing campaign to challenge Big Tech and define the meaning of digital sovereignty, we show that market-directors have ushered in potentially comprehensive policy change.