Infomedia welcomes new bill which will promote competition in digital markets and safeguard consumers

The recently announced Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Bill aims to promote growth in the UK economy by ensuring vigorous competition amongst businesses whilst strengthening the Competition and Market Authority’s (CMA) powers to crack down on unfair practices. 

With a focus on Consumer Protection, Digital Markets and Competition, the new legislation is intended to help deliver one of the Government’s five priorities to grow the economy by increasing consumer choice and confidence in the products they buy and services they use.

The CMA has set up a new Digital Markets Unit to tackle the dominance of a few big tech companies and are determined to enable Businesses and consumers to finally reap the full benefits of the digital economy with confidence by being protected from rip-offs.

Among other measures, of particular relevance to the DCB industry the Bill will:

• Enable The Competition and Markets Authority to take direct action against firms in breach without requiring a court order
• Deliver fines for breaches (up to 10% of global turnover)
• Require reviews to be demonstrably audited for genuine reviews only – and more broadly ensure no advertising contains false or misleading claims
• Require firms to enable easier management of subscriptions
• Require easier methods of exit from subscriptions
• Require clearer terms and conditions of minimal contractual periods and auto-renewals
• Require clearer descriptions of auto-renewing subscriptions
• Require firms to give more advance notice of auto-renewal

Many of the above regulations have already been adopted by Infomedia and the wider DCB industry and Infomedia’s fully managed DCB platform incorporates an end-to-end payments experience including checkout and subscription management that is by design fully compliant with the new rules.

Mark Robinson, CEO at Infomedia said:

“We fully support the aims of the new Bill in offering significant benefits to both businesses and consumers by seeking to level the playing field for digital services providers. The fact that our processes already support many of the key regulations put forward is testament to our integrity and continued focus on growth and innovation within the digital markets sector and we look forward to seeing new opportunities develop and consumer confidence grow as a result of this new legislation.”