Tom Morrison-Bell:

Yes, I can. I am happy to touch on some of those issues with regard to the Bill. As you will have heard by now, the Bill gives very extensive powers to the DMU that will be highly discretionary and very open-ended. That is how the Bill has been drafted. In Google’s case, those will be powers to direct how complex products are designed, and critically the regime will be forward-looking rather than backward-looking, which is how traditional competition policy works. As I have said, Google’s products and services drive a huge amount of consumer benefit in the UK, and these markets are fast-moving and complex.

With the Bill specifically, our key point is that in relation to products that provide a substantial amount of consumer benefit, that are innovative and that are complex, it is important that these very open-ended powers for the regulator have appropriate checks and balances. I wanted to bring to the Committee three specific areas in which we think the Bill can be strengthened. I am sure that you will have heard about these in other sessions.

First, I think there are strong grounds for making sure that the appeals standard is aligned with that in the Competition Act 1998, which is appeal on the merits as opposed to judicial review. Secondly, the Bill should ensure that consumer benefits can appropriately be considered by the regulator in the regime by adding a bit more coherence to the way the countervailing benefits exemption is constructed. Thirdly, one of the really innovative things that is designed to drive the Government’s ambition of ensuring that it is a speedy regime with innovation at its heart is this idea of a participative approach, whereby all parties involved in the market are encouraged into dialogue with the regulator.

One thing that the Bill provides for is for private cases to be brought before the digital markets unit has found any breach of a requirement on a firm. If that is the case, we think it is important that the digital markets unit is given the opportunity to make the decision first. Otherwise, there is a risk of the courts deciding something and the digital markets unit deciding something else, so that we end up with potentially conflicting compliance requirements on regulated firms.