Consultation on new digital markets competition guidance

The Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) purpose is to help people, businesses and the UK economy by protecting competition and tackling unfair behaviour.

This includes work to ensure that across digital markets, people can be confident they are getting great choices and fair deals; that competitive, fair-dealing businesses can innovate and thrive; and that dynamic competition stimulates investment and competitive innovation, driving economic growth and productivity.

Current status

Following this consultation, we have asked the Secretary of State to approve the digital markets competition regime guidance. This is a legislative requirement under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

We will publish the guidance after it’s approved.

The new digital markets competition regime

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act 2024 establishes a new digital markets competition regime. This includes providing the CMA with the power to designate powerful digital firms with Strategic Market Status (SMS) in a digital activity, and then to impose interventions to promote greater competition and innovation.

There are 3 types of potential intervention:

• we can impose conduct requirements that aim to guide the behaviour of SMS firms and tackle conduct that could exploit consumers and businesses or undermine fair competition
• we can impose pro-competition interventions on SMS firms to remedy, mitigate or prevent factors which are preventing, restricting or distorting competition
• SMS firms will also have to report to us on intended mergers, before their completion, where they have a value of £25 million or more, a UK connection, and involve the acquisition of 15 per cent or more of the shares or voting rights in the target business

We will monitor these interventions and SMS firms’ compliance with them and we can enforce for potential breaches of regulatory requirements and, where we find wrong-doing, impose significant penalties.

Responding to our consultation