The Times - Ignore the critics: new rules over Big Tech will hugely benefit the sector
Director of Europe & transatlantic partnerships Max von Thun talks about the advancement of new antimonopoly enforcements on Big Tech in the UK.
Big Tech might not like it, but robust competition policy is a critical ingredient in ensuring Britain’s technology success. Last week was a momentous one for competition policy. On Tuesday, the government published the 400-page Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, the biggest upgrade to the UK’s competition framework in years. The next day, the Competition and Markets Authority announced it was blocking Microsoft’s $69 billion attempt to buy Activision Blizzard, the games publisher. The back-to-back moves led to frenzied warnings that Britain was strangling its technology sector and shutting its doors to investment. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Responding to the CMA’s veto of its acquisition, Brad Smith, the Microsoft president, claimed the decision had “severely shaken” confidence in UK technology, while Lulu Cheng Meservey, Activision’s chief communications officer, called it a “disservice to UK citizens” — in other words, equating the interests of two multibillion-dollar American corporations with those of the entire UK economy and technology sector.
The facts of the case belie such overblown rhetoric. As the competition authority explained in its decision, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision would have given it a potentially unshakeable grip over the emerging cloud gaming market, in which Britain is poised to play a big role. By combining Activision’s enviable catalogue (including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft) with Microsoft’s dominance in cloud computing and personal computers, the deal would have made it extremely difficult for challengers, including British companies, to break into and survive in the market.
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