The U.K.’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has proposed measures to regulate how tech giants Apple and Google operate their mobile ecosystems under the new Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Act. This follows the CMA’s investigations, launched in January, into whether Apple and Google hold “strategic market status” in their smartphone operating systems, app stores, and web browsers. The proposed rules aim to curb their dominance and facilitate greater market access for competitors reliant on their services.
Edith Hancock for The Wall Street Journal:
The CMA said Wednesday that both Apple and Google hold an effective duopoly within the mobile platform economy, and that conduct requirements for the companies could focus on things like allowing app developers to steer users to better deals outside of the companies’ own app stores, and giving users “a genuine choice over the services they use on their devices.”
“Apple and Google’s mobile platforms are both critical to the U.K. economy — playing an important role in all our lives, from banking and shopping to entertainment and education,” Sarah Cardell, the CMA’s chief executive, said in a statement. “But our investigation so far has identified opportunities for more innovation and choice,” she said. The watchdog set an Oct 22. deadline to make its final verdict on targeting both companies under the law.
Google’s senior director of competition, Oliver Bethell, said in a blog post Wednesday that today’s announcement is “disappointing and unwarranted.”
Apple also criticized the CMA’s plans, saying asking it to change how its iPhones work could scupper its own security provisions.
“We’re concerned the rules the U.K. is now considering would undermine the privacy and security protections that our users have come to expect, hamper our ability to innovate, and force us to give away our technology for free to foreign competitors,” a spokesperson said.
MacDailyNews Take: Bureaucratic fools – Big Government spawn – like the CMA’s Sarah Cardell abound. Same as it ever was. More red tape has never delivered more innovation and choice, always less.
Because there is a morass of regulation that effectively bans billions of pounds more of investment from flowing into Britain. Thickets of red tape… allowed to spread through the British economy like Japanese knotweed… [D]eregulation is now essential… [I]f we don’t curb regulator overreach, then we won’t unlock the investment needed for a more prosperous future…
A change in the economic weather can only ever come from a supply-side expansion of the nation’s productive power. In the 1980s, the Thatcher government deregulated finance capital… [Today], globalisation increased the opportunities for trade. This is our equivalent. For too long regulation has stopped Britain building its future. – Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, January 28 2025
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. ― Ronald Reagan
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