India’s search for a workable model of digital-market regulation has moved through several distinct phases within the space of four years: a parliamentary diagnosis of a regulatory gap, the drafting of an ambitious ex-ante code modelled substantially on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, and a subsequent pause for evidence-gathering after that code met sustained resistance from both global technology companies and domestic start-ups. This paper traces that trajectory, from the Standing Committee on Finance’s 2022 report on anti-competitive practices by big technology companies through the Draft Digital Competition Bill 2024 to the Standing Committee’s own reassessment in August 2025, and situates it against the lived enforcement experience of three comparator regimes: the European Union, the United Kingdom and Germany. Each offers India a different lesson about the costs and benefits of pre-emptive market intervention. The paper argues that the pause announced in 2025 is best read not as an abandonment of ex-ante regulation but as a necessary correction to a Bill that borrowed the European Union’s rulebook without its institutional infrastructure. Drawing on the Competition Commission of India’s expanding ex-post caseload through 2025 and 2026, its cautious market study on artificial intelligence, and the trade-policy backdrop against which digital regulation is now negotiated, the paper contends that India’s future ex-ante framework should be narrower in scope, evidence-led in its thresholds, procedurally safeguarded along German and British lines, and sequenced to work alongside, rather than instead of, a strengthened Competition Act regime. Its proposed model is built around market-specific thresholds, prior hearing safeguards, bespoke conduct obligations, institutional capacity-building, inter-regulatory coordination, and AI-responsive review mechanisms.