Britain signals it is prepared to go easier on Big Tech regulation
Britain’s appointment of a former Amazon executive to lead its antitrust regulator is seen as an invitation for investment, particularly from Big Tech, suggesting a more lenient approach to mergers and acquisitions if it could stimulate economic growth, according to company executives and legal experts.
Paul Sandle, Kate Holton, and Andres Gonzalez for Reuters:
Doug Gurr, former boss of the U.S. online retailer’s UK operation, was picked to chair the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) after Marcus Bokkerink recognised “it was time to move on”, finance minister Rachel Reeves said on Wednesday…
[T]he selection of Gurr as chair – on an interim basis for now – indicated Britain was moving closer to U.S. regulation in the hope it would attract investment.
One FTSE-100 chief executive, who asked not to be named, said… with Donald Trump’s new U.S. administration set to give greater leeway to the likes of Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia, Britain realised it needed to follow suit. “Given the way the world is going in terms of size and scale of business, we maybe need to look at things in a somewhat different way in the UK,” he said.
Martin Sorrell, CEO of ad group S4 Capital and founder of WPP, said the talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos was that Britain – and Europe – had become overly regulated. “Maybe this is a welcome change in the UK,” he told Reuters.
MacDailyNews Take: The pendulum swings.
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