The beginning of a new year always marks some sort of introduction of a new regulatory framework. The EU welcomed Romania and Bulgaria to the Schengen Zone, and the common charger policy went live (including in Northern Ireland, raising concerns of a BINO again). In the UK however, we had one of the most consequential digital legislation going live: the Digital Markets, Consumers and Competition Act 2024 (DMCCA), which is the framework for digital markets here in the UK.

Not soon after, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) with its newfound power, decided to investigate Google for its market dominance as a search engine and in search ads. This investigation is to establish whether Google has a “Strategic Market Status” (SMS) in these fields. Once designated as such, the CMA will then have the power to impose conduct requirements (CRs) or Pro Competition Intervention (PCIs) on how Google can provide its service, which very much affects consumers.

An example of what these interventions might look like can be found in the EU. If you google a restaurant or a shop, a map may be displayed, but clicking on the map has been disabled and the Maps link in the Google search bar has also been removed. This is because the EU believes that Google is promoting its own product, Google Maps, and not allowing other map providers to compete against its product, a concept that is called self-preferencing.

The EU’s demands have been a great source of inconvenience to many consumers, where consumer interface and efficiency have been made worse off thanks to bureaucratic overreach. The CMA will also investigate other companies in due course and has now launched an investigation into Apple.

The CMA has now pulled one of the classic tricks to legitimise their proposed intervention, by launching a consultation and bombarding it with incomprehensible gibberish that throws off the everyday consumer from being able to voice their concerns. Also note that the background for this consultation is pretty much a copy-paste job from their investigation into Google in 2019-2020. Since then, the industry has had seismic changes, such as the introduction of AI in search engines.

The reality is that this investigation is a very loaded question, with the potential to have wide-ranging consequences that the everyday consumer will bear the impact of. If a new independent restaurant is not able to use one of the biggest search engines to locate itself on the map, then how will it be possible for the restaurant to succeed and consumers to enjoy this new restaurant?

I understand the CMA’s dilemma: It is being scapegoated as the institution that has to regulate digital activity with a small team (even smaller now having had to fire 10 per cent of its employees due to a budgeting error). This is an impossible task to achieve, even if you spend 100 per cent of the UK GDP in attempting so. Regulators react to innovation and not preempt it. This also leads to far more restrictive legislation.

The other dilemma is squaring competition with the network effect. What makes the internet an interesting market is the fact that it gains additional value as more people use it. The more people input their data in Google, the more it becomes useful for everyone else. This intuitively would lead to a conclusion that eliminates competition as everyone will be inclined to use Google.

However, this has not been the case. If anything we have seen fierce competition between all the big tech companies, enabling the creation of more innovative products. This is amplified by the introduction of AI, where more and more people are now using Chat-GPT instead of Google, forcing Google to introduce its own AI capabilities in its search engines. This is not a monopoly, this is competition.

Crucially, these regulatory interventions are so bureaucratically minded that these investigations did not even consider current consumer satisfaction with products owned and used, or even attempt to quantify the change of consumer satisfaction before and after such interventions. Meanwhile, for businesses to profit in this sector, they need to greatly factor in consumer satisfaction, an arguably better means of self-regulating consumer protection.

The reality is at a time when the UK has been stagnating economically, it has been due to these restrictive measures. The Whitehall bureaucratic mentality values its ability to control and impose itself over industry rather than working with the markets to encourage innovation and consumer protection and convenience.

To grow, we need to encourage innovation and technological advancements, which will catalyze what resources we have now to increase our output exponentially. Rachel Reeves hinted at such measures when she mentioned the replacement of the CMA chair in her discurso. However, amending such a bureaucratically restrictive mentality requires more than just words, which will be the Government’s challenge in the next few years.

To conclude, The First and Second Industrial Revolutions were spearheaded by Britain. Whilst notable British figures assisted in driving the Third Industrial Revolution, we were not in a position to lead, and now as we approach the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the era of Artificial Intelligence, it is the Americans who have created the petri dish for such innovation.

With the inauguration of Donald Trump, it is most likely that their permissive environment for innovation is amplified. Reeves said all the right things in her speech at Siemens, but for the UK to have a decent chance at being a playmaker in digital innovation, we need less investigations and EU alignment, and more entrepreneurial and realistic thinking.

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