Over the past decade, the EU has produced an almost continuous stream of heavyweight digital regulations, including GDPR, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, and the Data Act. Each pursues legitimate goals—privacy, consumer safety, fair competition—but the cumulative side effects may now be outweighing the cure.
Together, these overlapping measures have formed a dense and often confusing regulatory landscape. As economist Jagdish Bhagwati once described overlapping free-trade agreements as a “spaghetti bowl,” arguing that the hundreds of interwoven rules poured into national legal frameworks tie those systems in knots. I believe the same analogy now suits Brussels’ digital rule-book: a tangled mass of regulatory noodles in which every strand (consent forms, risk audits, data-localisation clauses, very complicated compliance requirements) crosses the next, impossible to pick up without dragging half the dish with it.
The consequences are visible on the ground. Compliance with such intensive EU regulations is so paperwork-heavy that it distorts competition instead of sharpening it. Even mid-sized European start-ups now hire entire legal teams just to map overlapping national interpretations of these rules—exactly the kind of red tape the EU’s Single Market was meant to abolish. The result is an environment in which scale is punished rather than rewarded, and where the cost of “playing by the rules” in Europe grows faster than revenue for many firms.
Yet the regulatory carbs do not stay in Continental Europe. The EU is, by far, the world’s largest exporter of rules and regulations. Thanks to what Anu Bradford calls “the Brussels effect,” the EU’s rule-book travels well: firms that export to Europe often adopt its standards worldwide, and many governments distant from Europe transpose them to avoid being shut out of the single market. Candidate countries import the acquis to keep accession hopes alive; non-aspirants follow suit simply because Brussels has become the world’s default setter of product and data regulations. In practice, Europe’s dense tangle of digital noodles drapes itself over legal systems far beyond the Rhine. In other words, the costs of compliance are no longer borne by Europeans alone; they have become a global levy on anyone who wants to trade with, or through, the EU.
Turkey is a prime example in this regard. Its Customs Union anchor, export volumes, FDI inflows, and tourist arrivals are all tilted decisively toward Europe—and, on paper at least, it remains an official EU candidate. Of course, Ankara has no hope of full EU membership, and Turkish voters still less, yet ministries keep copy-pasting Brussels’ texts with some cosmetic tweaks. I should note that economic and geographical proximity, not accession Chapters, drives Turkey’s “regulation imports from the EU”—and its new e-commerce law shows that this is the case, which I examine in the next section. Also, for many countries like Turkey, importing rules are cheaper than drafting them: why marshal hundreds of experts when ready-made PDFs are freely available on Brussels’ websites?
Turkey’s New E-Commerce Law
Set your LinkedIn location to Istanbul and you’ll be surprised that your feed quickly fills with compliance-analyst vacancies as Turkey’s e-commerce companies are having a hard time digesting a surfeit of new regulations. When Ankara passed Law No. 7416 in July 2022 (effective as of January 1, 2023), it openly framed the text as an EU-alignedupgrade to its 2014 E-Commerce Law. The amended law and the secondary regulations borrowed the EU’s notice-and-takedown regime and graft DMA-style turnover tiers onto Turkey.
The notion of putting DMA’s “gatekeepers” under tougher scrutiny has shown itself in very strict advertisement and discount budgets in its Turkish implementation. The new rule lets a platform spend up to 2 % of the first TRY 30 billion in annual net transactions on advertisements or price cuts, and a wafer-thin 0.3 ‰ on every lira thereafter—so a marketplace clearing TRY 50 billion is frozen at roughly TRY 960 million for each pot. The government’s intention was said to stop “exclusionary” tactics in the market, such as splashy deals that raise rivals’ costs or predatory discounts that squeeze them out. However, no empirical study has shown Turkish platforms over-advertise, nor that consumers suffer from an excess of coupons. To the contrary, the first full fiscal year under the amended law saw both e-commerce giants (Trendyol and Hepsiburada) trim discount campaigns and raise commission rates, shifting costs back to sellers and—no surprise—consumers.
Worse, the amended law never pins down what counts as “advertising” (is co-branded content marketing in or out?), which invites disputes and transaction costs. Advertising signals quality and helps smaller merchants reach eyeballs; deep discounts boost volume and consumer surplus. Hard limits in Turkey, therefore, risk dulling one of e-commerce’s chief welfare benefits while letting regulators, not shoppers, decide how cheap a flash sale may be. The caps look less like a calibrated competition tool and more like an arbitrary brake that nudges prices up, throttles output, and does the very thing the law claims to prevent: tilting the pitch away from efficiency and toward the favored few who can clear compliance hurdles with cash to spare.
It is clear that the targets are self-preferencing giants Trendyol and Hepsiburada; however, the law taxes turnover, not market power. Also, meeting its quotas demands real-time dashboards, daily SKU tagging, and quarterly external audits. This is a lot of requirements, and these are quite costly. Internal estimates, leaked to the media, put each firm’s initial compliance bill in the low-to-mid eight-figure dollar range for each platform. There is also a sliding-scale license fee envisioned up to 25 % of volume. It is for sure that for lower-margin categories (fashion, fast-moving consumer goods), the license fee alone is to wipe out profit.
Also, layered enforcement compounds the burden. The Ministry of Trade oversees Law 7416, while the Competition Authority continues to chase the very same behavior under antitrust Law 4054. One errant listing can trigger two parallel probes and two separate fines—a textbook case of forum shopping and legal uncertainty. Opposition deputies cried foul, yet the Constitutional Court upheld the law in July 2023, judging consumer welfare more important than corporate cost. That verdict coincided with secondary rules that extended license fees to cross-border sales and specified line-by-line reporting templates.
Copy-pasting or being inspired by Brussels’ regulatory machinery without Brussels-sized market scale, capital depth, or cooperation capacity leaves Turkey’s champions lugging fixed costs that bite harder than they do in the EU. I am not sure to what extent the new regulations nurture smaller sellers in Turkey; early observations instead point to higher prices, fewer discounts, and thinner innovation budgets.
The lesson is plain. Importing rules is an easy task, and alignment with Brussels’ rules and regulations may make Turkey look good internationally. However, such moves are reasonable only when the weight of regulations is calibrated to national realities—otherwise, the spaghetti bowl merely slides, intact, onto a smaller plate and spills over the edges.
* Dr. Ömer Faruk Şen
