This article examines Brazil’s emerging experiment with ex ante antitrust regulation for digital markets and situates it within the global turn toward proactive governance of digital ecosystems. It first reconstructs CADE’s “digital turn,” showing how enforcement practice, institutional capacity building, and transnational policy networks have progressively embedded platform regulation into Brazil’s competition agenda. It then compares the two main legislative proposals now on the table—Bill No. 2,768/2022 and Bill No. 4,675/2025—highlighting their divergent institutional logics, underlying theories of platform power, and implications for the allocation of authority between CADE and ANATEL. Finally, the article advances a normative blueprint for a Brazilian framework for ex ante antitrust regulation grounded in the country’s constitutional economic order, centered on CADE, and organized around regulatory cycles, market studies, civil-society participation, and adaptive obligations for systemically relevant platforms. Rather than importing foreign templates wholesale, the article argues that Brazil should treat ex ante antitrust regulation as an opportunity for institutional learning that aligns digital governance with domestic constraints and democratic priorities. A well-designed framework can transform the regulation of digital markets into a durable instrument of economic policy—one that disciplines private power, broadens participation in innovation, and positions Brazil as an agenda-setter rather than a mere rule-taker in global debates over platform regulation.
