Proposed Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer (DMCC) Bill

The proposed Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer (DMCC) Bill aims to update the UK’s competition and consumer rules to reflect modern consumer habits and business dynamics in the UK’s highly digitised economy.

This legislation seeks to introduce:

1. A new pro-competition regime for Digital Markets: by putting on a statutory footing the Digital Markets Unit (DMU), a specialist unit within the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that will seek to boost competition and increase consumer choice in concentrated digital markets.
2. Reforms to the Competition and Markets Authority: by reforming the processes of the CMA to speed up market investigations and enforcement of the existing competition rules and raising the threshold for mergers meaning smaller mergers and acquisitions can take place more quickly.
3. Updates to consumer law: the Bill will reform consumer policy to increase consumer protection, make it easier for consumers to manage subscription contracts and work with the tech sector to tackle the practice of fake reviews.

This significant piece of legislation raises ongoing questions about how the proposals will work in practice and whether new regimes in both competition and consumer policy can strike the right balance between supporting increased consumer choice, competition and innovation.

The full text of the proposals can be found here: The Government’s Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Bill.

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