CMA’s approach to Digital Markets competition regime

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published an overview of its provisional approach to implementing the new Digital Markets competition regime.

The UK parliament is currently considering the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill (the DMCC Bill). The legislation is designed to tackle the issue where many services across digital markets are provided by the same small number of tech firms and recognises that current anti-competition legislation doesn’t really cater for digital markets.

The overview sets out how the CMA plans to apply the legislation. They’re committed to using a targeted, evidence-based, and proportionate approach, but are keen to make use of the legislation to ‘level the competition playing field’. They plan to start three to four investigations within the first year, looking at whether the business concerned has Strategic Market Status in relation to one or more digital activities.

Where the CMA detects that a business is leveraging its status for an unfair competitive edge, it will act, and may impose conduct requirements.

Examples of these requirements might include prohibiting the business from giving preferential treatment to their own products and services, allowing interoperability of products and services from other businesses with their own offerings, or compelling them to enhance transparency around certain aspects of their algorithms.

If approved, the new digital markets competition regime should help tech challenger businesses compete and help everyone be more confident of getting great choices and fair deals when buying digital services.

You can find more details about the overview here.