After years of public consultations, expert reports and attempts at reining in big tech through antitrust enforcement actions, the European Commission (“EC”) has signaled that it will no longer rely solely on antitrust to provide a sufficiently robust approach to the problems that the EC sees in the markets in which big tech operates. The sweeping proposal, released on 15 December, 2020, includes an outright ban on certain practices (such as self-preferencing or misusing data collected from business users to gain an “unfair” competitive advantage) by digital “gatekeepers”, such as GAFA, that have attracted antitrust scrutiny in the EU (and elsewhere). If the legislation is adopted in its proposed form, the EC would no longer have to prove that the relevant practices amount to an antitrust violation in order to impose penalties such as heavy fines and, as a last resort, ordering the break-up of the companies concerned.