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3 hours ago
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The appointment of the former boss of Amazon UK to lead the competition watchdog poses a threat to its independence and pledge to hold big tech to account, according to a group including tech companies and the former business secretary Vince Cable.
The group – which includes the News Media Association, the Firefox developer Mozilla, the consumer group Which? and the Future of Technology Institute – has written to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to raise concerns about the appointment of Doug Gurr as the interim chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Gurr spent nine years at Amazon, including four years running the UK arm, before leaving to become the director of the Natural History Museum in 2020. He was appointed to the CMA last month, replacing the former chair Marcus Bokkerink, who ministers ousted days after Reeves called in the chief executives of UK regulators including the CMA to a meeting at No 11 to pressure them to do more to support growth.
“Following the removal of the CMA chair, and his replacement with a former Amazon executive, we are worried that the UK government is losing sight of its commitment to robust competition enforcement of the digital markets unit (DMU) regime and the CMA’s operational independence,” the signatories said in a two-page letter, seen by the Guardian.
Under legislation brought in by the previous government, the competition regulator launched the DMU with powers, which came in to force on 1 January, to set strict new rules on the operations of big tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon deemed to have “strategic market status”.
Signatories of the letter also included professors Derek McCauley and Philip Marsden, the deputy chair of the enforcement decision-making committee at the Bank of England, who were part of the expert panel set up by the Treasury six years ago to investigate the market power of US tech firms.
The review conducted by Jason Furman, Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, concluded that the dominance of the big digital players was curbing innovation and reducing consumer choice and recommended setting up a digital markets unit.
After Gurr’s appointment, which unions called a “slap in the face to workers”, the business minister Justin Madders was forced to deny the government was “in the pocket of big tech”.
The letter states: “The CMA’s independence must be rigorously defended if it is to pursue its mission in the face of aggressive lobbying from tech companies and other vested interests, whose sole aim is to defend the moats protecting their monopoly rents.
“The Labour party has long supported the need for robust and urgent action to tackle monopolisation of the UK’s tech sector.”
Gurr has said he will make the CMA’s investigations into mergers and takeovers “simple and rapid” and that a regulatory environment that encouraged the “greatest possible level of business investment” would be the agency’s new “north star”.
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However, Gurr has already been thrust into a potentially awkward situation after the CMA’s independent inquiry group said it had found that Amazon and Microsoft’s dominance of the cloud computing market could mean British businesses were paying as much as £430m more a year for services than in a “well-functioning market”.
The inquiry group said the CMA’s board, led by Gurr, should use recently acquired digital powers to see whether Amazon and Microsoft should be designated as having “strategic market status” in cloud services.
If they are deemed to have that status, the inquiry group said the CMA board should look at whether to impose conduct requirements or force other changes.
The CMA has declined to comment on whether Gurr will have to be recused from that decision-making process.
