Purpose and pragmatism in the UK’s digital markets competition regime

A speech by Will Hayter, the CMA's Executive Director for Digital Markets, delivered at CompLaw: Digital Conference.

"Thank you to the Informa team for having me.

The temptation on sitting down to write this sort of speech is always simply to give a list of all the great things we're doing through the digital markets competition regime. I took some good advice on that, and instead I'm going to start with what motivates me, personally. Why have I chosen to do a job which many would frame as taking on giants with a slingshot.

People have been known to say about me that I am: bloody-minded, a glutton for punishment, hard to keep up with, have preternatural staying power and am occasionally prone to taking on missions that some could see as Quixotic.

Those are the sort of things likely to be said by my mates, who know, for example, that I spend a fair amount of my free time doing things like riding mountain bikes round in circles in mud and rain for 24 straight hours (once with a broken hip)

But they might also be said by people who have at least a passing familiarity with the UK's digital markets competition regime not necessarily something that anyone does with an expectation either of being popular, or of having the easy life

Now, I'm not going to attempt to explain those choices, because to do so might be to engage in a level of self-analysis that probably wouldn't be wise in private, let alone in a public setting

What I am going to explain, however, is why I choose to take all that determination, marry it with what I hope is a good dose of thoughtfulness and reasonableness, a level of humility, and yes pragmatism, and apply it to the question of how to work with the big tech firms the most powerful economic entities the world has ever seen to achieve better outcomes for the UK.

Purpose

So why do I, along with the hundred or so brilliant people who work with me, do it?

Sometimes the most obvious answer is actually the real one: we care about people in the UK, who deserve choices and great products. And we care about companies operating in the UK, who deserve their fair chance at success.

That is all central to the CMA's purpose, as laid out in our new 2026 to 2029 Strategy: to promote competition and protect consumers to drive economic growth and household prosperity. And we were quite conscious in that Strategy to explain the mutually reinforcing nature of that twin purpose. The kind of good growth that effective competition can support is the same kind of growth that benefits households.

A couple of provisos before I continue.

In many cases, the market takes enough care of both companies and people such is the power of competition to give people a choice of innovative products and services at reasonable prices, and to give companies with great ideas the chance to succeed.

But sometimes that simply doesn't work in practice.

If companies don't do right by consumers, we may have to step in. You will have seen the range of cases we've brought so far under the new, stronger consumer protection regime, with millions of pounds in fines and direct redress in areas like drip pricing and pressure selling. But that's a different speech by a different CMA Board member.

And sometimes, just as a result of the way a market works, a company can end up in a position of particular power, which can result in choice being limited, innovation being held back, or prices or other terms not being fair because the market is unable to discipline them sufficiently.

So we are looking out for companies wanting to offer compelling services in the UK and to grow and to thrive; and that's companies wherever they are based, but particularly thinking about UK companies because we all want and need the UK economy to grow, for the benefit of everyone in this country.

The importance of digital platforms to the economy is so great that they affect hundreds of thousands of other companies in myriad ways. Businesses might use a platform as their main way of advertising to potential customers; they might rely on a platform for key inputs; a platform might be a critical driver of traffic to their own sites or channels; or in some cases it might be pretty much the only way of efficiently reaching particular groups of consumers.

App developers, corporate or public sector customers of the big cloud companies, advertisers on Google, website owners, fintech innovators, manufacturers of connected devices, software developers in other words hundreds of thousands of businesses across the UK, right from one-person start-ups to the biggest firms all of these rely on a mix of platforms daily to run their own businesses.

All these companies need the confidence to invest, and the knowledge that if the market isn't working well, there is someone there to give competition a fair chance. Someone who has their back.

And what about consumers? Consumers should be able to get great products and services, choose freely where they spend their money or their attention, and know that they can trust the market because there's enough transparency for them to understand what they are being offered. Often all too often perhaps consumers don't know that we're there to keep an eye out for them; but we are.

Importantly, standing for UK businesses and UK consumers doesn't mean riding roughshod over the interests of the big tech firms themselves. Firms of all sizes and of all nationalities should have a chance to thrive.

And these are extraordinary organisations investing unprecedented sums of money in providing services that are constantly evolving, services we all use every day of our lives. We want the big firms to keep investing and innovating; we just want to make sure that others can as well .

Quite apart from anything else, the legal framework is very clear about the fact that any intervention must be not just effective, but also proportionate. And there are very effective checks and balances built into the system to make sure that evidence is properly reviewed and all firms get a fair hearing. We know stakeholders sometimes feel frustrated by that process; they want us to get to results faster.

We put a huge value on speed to impact, make no mistake. But that fairness of process, and proportionality of outcomes, is what makes the UK's digital markets competition regime uniquely robust and agile.

Pragmatism

On which, let me move on from purpose to pragmatism.

Now I would say this, wouldn't I; but I do think that the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act is an exceptionally well designed legislative tool to bring about positive change it is precise enough to set boundaries, but flexible enough to respond to the realities of the market and to adapt over time as those realities shift.

That carefully crafted design is one reason for the time it took for the regime to move from first concept to finally coming into force. The CMA's Digital Markets Unit, it may surprise some of you to know, has actually just passed its fifth birthday, despite the fact that today marks a mere 18 months to the day, no less since we have had a legal framework actually in force.

One thing I observed during the long gestation period of the regime was that its very flexibility allowed people to impose their own visions, for better or for worse, on how it would work in practice.

I heard people say at one extreme that they were, in effect, expecting it to save their business model by completely upending whatever hey saw as their own particular digital nemesis. And at the other extreme, I heard different people say that flexibility meant unbounded uncertainty which represented a threat to the very core of their business.

Perhaps none of that should have been surprising. Issues of tech and power are at the heart of the debates of the day, not just in the UK but round the world; and it's all too easy to present a new and somewhat unknown quantity as either a panacea for the world's ills or a bogeyman.

In the event, neither of those caricatures was right. It is only now, as we start to put in place actual measures, that you can see what the regime really is: a very smart, very well-designed mechanism to make flexible, targeted, proportionate interventions via a participative, iterative approach able to keep pace with evolving tech.

Those words may be familiar to you. They were used a lot during policy debates, and leading up to launch. And they are important because they describe, as plainly as possible, not just the mechanisms for intervention but a manner of implementation unique to the UK. We made that manner of implementation explicit in our Approach Document on in January 2024, and built on it in our guidance and in our explanation of how we would use our 4Ps framework in the digital markets context in April 2025.

But this approach had been consistent in spirit throughout that long gestation right the way back to its roots in the Furman Review in 2019, which said: engaged, agile and participative pro-competition regulation is the better approach'.

It turns out that when we said the UK approach would be pragmatic not ideological; determined not pugnacious; targeted rather than sweeping; flexible not rigid we actually meant it.

The publisher conduct requirement

The first conduct requirement we put in place on Google in searchexemplifies the regime and the way we're going about implementing it.

It is tailored. The requirement is precisely aimed at the problem, which has been that publishers could not choose to remove their content from Google's AI-driven search services without removing it from search as a whole, with all the negative effects for their traffic that that would involve. The new control now allows them to make that choice, which we expect to make a significant difference to their ability to negotiate with Google, as well as requiring Google to attribute the content it uses.

It is up to date and timely, but able to adjust over time as well. The issue of the relationships between Google and website owners has been ever-present over the years. Given the prevalence of Google search, it is one of the most important sets of relationships in the whole information ecosystem of the web, whether for news or other content and indeed the importance of those relationships were often talked about as the regime was being designed. But in 2026 the advent of AI Overviews and AI Mode means those relationships are different even from how they were when the legislation was passed in 2024. So it was vital that we made the requirement fit for purpose for the moment, while also recognising that as the market continues to develop, so might our requirements need to develop. The flexibility built into the regime allows us to do exactly that.

It is participative. On the same day that we announced our Conduct Requirement, Google announced its roll-out plan for the new control that is a large component of how it expects to comply with the requirement. That was no coincidence; we had been working closely with Google for months on what would be technically feasible to meet the objective of giving publishers greater control and ensuring attribution.

Two important points to add here however on the participative approach, for anyone who is tempted to think this is all a cosy process with the SMS firms:

First, over those same months, we had also been talking constantly to a range of publishers and content owners, to understand what would be effective from their side as well. That has involved two rounds of information requests, direct discussions with over 30 individual publishers, roundtables with over 50 diverse organisations as well as an alphabet soup of trade bodies from the sector, representing a variety of types and sizes of publisher. And importantly that doesn't stop now the rules are in place; we're continuing all that engagement so that we know what effect the control has had on the negotiations between Google and publishers.

Second, it is certainly not the case that we and Google agree on every point. As one might expect, there are points of greater difference and points of greater alignment. We have tried always to be open and to listen; and indeed in some places moved to accommodate good arguments made by Google. But in other places the conduct requirement sharpened between consultation and final rule, in response to consultation input from companies that rely on Google every day for the continued success of their businesses.

But, and I make no apologies for this: it is not our job to make everyone happy. Nor was that Parliament's intent. It is our job to enforce the regime in the interests of UK consumers and businesses, in the most proportionate way possible.

The right tools for the job

When it comes to how we implement, one of the big debates we observe is around the right' tool for the job. We have many approaches available to us and have tried to avoid falling into the trap of being the hammer that sees everything as a nail. Just because we have the structure of SMS and Conduct Requirements available to us, that doesn't mean that is the right tool for every market issue.

We are focused not on being as aggressive or loud or provocative as possible, nor on whether the UK can be the world's toughest digital regulator' or some such as if titles like that alone somehow secure good outcomes. Instead, we are obsessively focused on the aggregate positive impact we can have in the shortest possible time. The most direct route to changing things for the better, for those UK customers and businesses we care about.

In short, we will pick the tool which give us the best possible chance of success. And I will judge whether we have been successful by whether we have managed to bring about change that benefits people and companies in the UK, not by how many reports or pages of rules we have managed to churn out, or even more crudely how many arguments we have got into or how many fines we have issued.

For those who signed up for ringside seats at a fight to the death, this may be disappointing. But again, I would respectfully suggest that this was never the spirit of the regime and I suspect it would be a short-lived one if we chose to use it in that way.

That does not mean we pull our punches where robust action is called for. In some cases, the answer is absolutely going to involve SMS and conduct requirements, as with the first three on search, and there will be others to come. But in others, we are proving we can achieve impact through different routes.

One example is the use of commitments in the first round of measures in mobile. We were able to secure what we think are important steps from Apple and Google in relation to app store review, ranking and data use, and n Apple's case a new interoperability process, without going the full formal route but in the knowledge that we have that backstop readily and quickly available if needed. Again this is consistent with the roots of the framework back in the Furman report.

Another is our approach on cloud and business software. Informed by our ongoing discussions with UK businesses, both AWS and Microsoft are taking steps to facilitate switching and use of multiple clouds, and have committed to work with us to look for further opportunities to support customer choice.

Alongside, we have launched an SMS investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem, to consider concerns we had previously identified with its licensing practices distorting customers' choice of cloud. But the importance of this work extends beyond cloud, to include ensuring UK businesses can choose AI tools that best suit their needs, whether they are provided by Microsoft or other providers.

Mobile steering and digital wallets

Today we have also taken the next steps on mobile, which again hopefully exemplify the approach we want to take.

We are consulting today on draft conduct requirements to support so-called steering', or the ability for app developers to engage directly with their users outside Apple's and Google's app stores.

Many approaches have been proposed to the well-known issues around app distribution, and indeed a mix of different approaches taken across the globe. There is no silver bullet for these problems, but we think it is important to give both app developers and users more choice about how they communicate and how they transact. This is not only because choice is inherently valuable but also because we see this as the best way to introduce some competitive pressure in a vital part of the mobile ecosystem that is otherwise sorely lacking such pressure.

It is important that these additional choices are genuine, meaningful, and allowed without unreasonable restrictions. And while it is only fair for Apple and Google to be compensated for the services they provide, any fees they charge must be justified through a robust, evidence-led framework involving due reference to both cost and value.

In parallel we are seeking views on key aspects of opening up access to the NFC chip on Apple's iOS platform, to allow other apps to complete contactless transactions on an iPhone. The right access here should support innovative offers across fintech services and beyond into IDs, car keys, and no doubt many more that no-one has even thought of yet. This is consistent with the focused approach to interoperability issues, which we set out in our roadmap last July.

Like steering this involves questions of fees, but also of technology standards, on both of which we look forward to receiving evidence-based submissions to inform where we go next with this.

Conclusion

I hope, after all that, I have gone some way toward answering the question I asked at the beginning why do we do this work?

We know why we're here to make sure competition in digital markets is serving the interests of people and businesses in the UK. Not only that, we know how to work to make that happen flexible, engaged, focused on creative solutions and impactful outcomes for the UK.

In other words: purposeful and pragmatic."