Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment has he made of the implications for his Department’s policy of the antitrust charges brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the independent non-Ministerial department responsible for investigating competition issues in the UK. The Government has ensured that the CMA has significant powers to investigate and act if it finds that companies are behaving anti-competitively in a market.

In July 2020, the CMA published the final report of its market study into online platforms and digital advertising. In the recent response to the market study, the Government agreed with the CMA’s findings that Google and Facebook are dominant in the search and social media markets and that this is leading to higher prices for goods and services, less innovation and less choice for consumers.

The Government also announced the intention to establish and fund a Digital Markets Unit (DMU) within the CMA from April 2021, to create a new pro-competition regime for digital markets. A consultation on the DMU will be published in early 2021 and the Government will legislate to put it on a statutory footing as soon as Parliamentary time allows.