Abstract:In the context of rapid market transformations, linked to globalization and digitization, many advanced economies witness growing demands to protect small independent businesses and mainly small retailers vis a vis the monopolizing tendencies of online giants such as Amazon. The paper identifies normative justifications that can ground offering such protection and traces their roots in existing doctrines and rules, as they emerge in both national market regulation and EU economic law. For example my paper considers the regulation of entry in retail markets, as well as the antitrust treatment of potentially anticompetitive practices such as selective distribution agreements. The paper argues that such doctrines and rules are best understood as attempts to protect a plurality of market arrangements in the interest of consumers and their identities. In so doing the paper offers an interpretation of the consumer interest that is much broader than the interest to low and competitive prices, and problematizes an influential distinction between producerism and consumerism in economic law. The paper and the talk are opportunities to discuss the kind of goals that can and should drive the design of markets and their regulation by both private law rules and public regulation, beyond more traditional notions of autonomy, efficiency and fairness.