Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Enterprise and Markets
(): Today, the Government
is introducing the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers
Bill. The Bill will drive growth, innovation and productivity,
ensuring that businesses and consumers in the UK reap the
benefits of competitive markets. The Bill will:
- boost innovation by increasing competition in digital
markets, taking action against a small number of the most
powerful tech companies that force businesses and consumers to
sign up to unfair terms and pay inflated prices;
- grow the economy by enhancing our wider competition regime to
focus it on the areas of greatest harm, delivering a level
playing field for businesses; and
- protect consumers by strengthening the enforcement of
consumer protection law and introducing new consumer rights, for
example tackling subscription traps that currently set consumers
back £1.6 billion a year.
Digital technologies have transformed the way we buy products and
services, increasing accessibility, flexibility and choice – but
we need to act now to address their potential for consumer harm.
For instance, companies can make it unreasonably difficult for
consumers to cancel a subscription, or inhibit choice by
artificially ranking their own products higher in search results.
The Bill will give consumers greater choice and drive innovation,
leading to new products that transform lives. It will also
establish new, faster tools to address the unique barriers to
competition in digital markets, allowing the Competition and
Markets Authority (CMA) to proactively drive more dynamic markets
and prevent harmful practices such as making it difficult to
switch between operating systems.
We are using the freedoms we have gained by leaving the EU to
address these issues in a way that best works for the UK. We can
now make our own decisions on how we maintain a proportionate
system of regulation that drives innovation and protects
consumers. Our new pro-competition regime, focused on the most
powerful tech companies, is flexible and principles-based rather
than following the EU Digital Markets Act's blanket set of
obligations on all ‘gatekeepers’, which risks creating
unnecessary regulatory burdens for firms. Our more targeted and
pro-innovation approach involves investigating specific harms,
developing tailored obligations, and taking more evidence-based
regulatory decisions - informed by significant engagement with
the firms themselves. We are also taking a power to ban unfair
commercial practices, such as fake reviews, and are strengthening
oversight of Alternative Dispute Resolution services that would
have been more constrained whilst in the EU.
The Bill will also support consumers through new and improved
rights to deal with bad business practices such as subscription
traps. This includes better information up front as well as
easier exiting and earlier cancellation rights. These and other
new measures will save consumers’ hard-earned cash and protect
them from scams and rip-offs. We expect the Bill’s enforcement
reforms to increase consumer benefits by tens of millions of
pounds above the CMA’s current estimate of £146.5 million a year.
The Bill will grow the economy by boosting competition, better
placing UK businesses to succeed in export markets. It will allow
the CMA to more effectively deter, prevent and, where necessary,
enforce against monopolistic behaviours to ensure that the free
market can operate effectively.
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