The UK Government has announced plans to set up a new antitrust watchdog that’ll focus on tech companies and particularly those funded by digital advertising, most notably Google and Facebook. The new “Digital Markets Unit” will be “set up to introduce and enforce a new code to govern the behaviour of platforms that currently dominate the [digital advertising] market,” the UK says.

Under the enforcement of the new Digital Markets Unit, tech giants “could be required to be more transparent about the services they provide and how they are using consumers’ data, give consumers a choice over whether to receive personalised advertising, and prevented from placing restrictions on their customers that make it hard for them to use rival platforms,” the UK says.

Notably, some European countries have long clashed with American tech giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. Over time, the EU has levied billions of dollars in fines on American tech giants, whereas Google alone has antitrust penalties of over $9 billion that it’s fighting in court. 

Also recently, Apple won a reversal of a 13 billion euros ($15.5 billion) tax penalty that it was required to pay to Irish tax authorities, a case that the European Union is challenging.

American tech giants have mostly clashed with EU authorities in the areas of competition enforcement, tax cases, and misuse of consumer data. Just recently, France ordered American tech giants to start paying a 3% tax on revenue from digital services in the country, doing so despite threats of tariffs from the current US administration.

One key area where the UK’s new antitrust unit will focus on is digital news, whereas it says that a new code will be created to govern commercial arrangements between news publishers and platforms like Facebook and Google which dominate the advertising market.

The UK definitely has sway in the global digital advertising market, given that around £14 billion ($18.7 billion) was spent on digital advertising in the country last year, 80% of which went to Facebook and Google. The creation of a new tech watchdog by the country may spur more antitrust enforcement for the two tech giants that dominate the country’s digital advertising market. 

Photo: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson by UK Prime Minister is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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