The UK’s Digital Markets Unit is likely to have powers to protect startups from the giants, and about time too
Don’t imagine that the UK’s national debt can be eroded by whacking
Facebook,
Google et al with fines worth 10% of their worldwide revenues. The Digital Markets Unit (DMU), the soon-to-be-created watchdog for the tech sector, would still have to ensure penalties are “proportionate”; and it would have to set out its fining framework in advance. Multibillion-pound fines might be extremely rare.
But the regulatory power to whack miscreants with big fines for breaches of new behavioural codes is important. It’s about having a “credible deterrence”, as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) put it in its advice to government about how the DMU should be designed.