A Fistful of Discretion: The UK’s DMCC After Two Years
When Sergio Leone shot “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” in 1966, he refused to hand the audience a clean moral. The “Good” wasn’t really good. The “Bad” looked almost restrained next to the Civil War’s industrial-scale carnage. And the “Ugly” drew your sympathy—even as you questioned why.
Two years into the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) enforcement of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC), a similar ambiguity hangs over the United Kingdom’s flagship digital-competition regime. Plenty deserves praise. Plenty invites criticism. More unsettling, the balance between the two may turn less on the statute itself than on who stands at the regulatory saloon door.
On balance, this story looks more encouraging than the one unfolding across the Channel under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The CMA has largely resisted the European Commission’s instinct to fire every barrel at once. At times, it has declined to fire at all. It has also shown a real—if uneven—sensitivity to the costs of intervening in markets that may already function tolerably well.
But those same features expose the regime’s fragility. The DMCC’s better outcomes reflect well-exercised regulatory discretion. And discretion can evaporate with a change in government.
With that caveat in mind, let’s survey the terrain.