Competition | Regulatory Outlook June 2022

Digital markets in the UK

As we have previously reported, digital regulation is a fast-moving topic in both the UK and the EU. This poses a number of potential competition law hurdles for businesses.

On 28 April, the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) published its workplan for 2022/23. The DRCF is a collaboration between the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA),  the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the communications regulator, Ofcom. It is tasked with driving greater cooperation between these regulators. For more details on its founding, previous activity and creation of a digital regulatory research repository please see our previous Insight.

Alongside its 2022/23 work plan the DRCF published a call for inputs on two papers on algorithmic processing: one on the benefits and harms of algorithms, and the other on the landscape of algorithmic auditing and the role of regulators. (Please see our Insight for more on these papers.) 

In 2021 the CMA identified a number of anti-competitive impacts that can result from the use of algorithms. This includes personalising prices to customers in an opaque way, manipulating customer choice architecture so that customers make choices that are not in their best interests, discriminating against individuals based on protected characteristics and abusing a dominant position by self-preferencing in ranking algorithms.

As part of its current work stream the DRCF intends to continue focusing on promoting competition and privacy in online advertising. Going forward, the DRCF proposes to review a number of developments in privacy and online advertising. This review will be done with collaboration between the CMA and ICO. 

Given the increasing digitalisation of business, these developments could have an impact on all businesses, even if they do not consider themselves to be a "digital business".