The final report of the digital platforms inquiry contains 23 recommendations spanning competition law, consumer protection, media regulation and privacy law.
Background: Australia is just one country where policymakers have been questioning the rise of digital platforms and the effect they are having on consumers, news, business and society more broadly, but there has been particular global interest in the Australian inquiry over the past 18 months.
What did the inquiry find? During the course of its Inquiry, the ACCC identified many adverse effects associated with digital platforms, many of which flow from the dominance of Google and Facebook in particular. These include how news content creators are reliant on the dominant digital platforms, yet face difficulties in monetising their content, that Australian society, like others around the world, has been impacted by disinformation and a rising mistrust of news and that consumers are not adequately informed about how their data is collected and used and have little control over the range of data collected.
‘Trust us’ is no longer an option: The familiar mantra from digital platforms in response to similar inquiries has been to ‘trust us’, however the ACCC believes that the issues uncovered during the Inquiry are too important to be left to the companies themselves. As such, the ACCC has made a series of recommendations to address the digital platforms’ impact on Australian media businesses and how Australians access news.
Recommendations: The recommendations mostly relate to the competition, consumer, and privacy concerns. Firstly, it's worth noting that regulation of digital platforms be dealt with by current regulators – there is no proposal to establish a new body, however there could be a specialist branch within the ACCC to proactively monitor and investigate potentially anti-competitive conduct by digital platforms. Privacy concerns should be dealt with through amendments to, and strengthening of, the Privacy Act. Otherwise, it’s believed that more effective consumer protections are critical to addressing issues associated with dominant digital platforms.
