Report from the BBC
In Brief – UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Government has forced out Marcus Bokkerink as the chair of its antitrust regulator for failing to prioritize the government’s economic growth agenda. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said she needed someone leading the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) who was aligned with her “strategic direction”. Reeves called for plans from all regulatory agencies to “tear down” red tape, saying “I want to see this mission woven into the very fabric of our regulators through a cultural shift from excessively focusing on risk to helping drive growth.” That followed Starmer’s comments to a gathering of investors last year that, “We will make sure that every regulator in this country – especially our economic and competition regulators – takes growth as seriously as this room does.” A team from the CMA led by CEO Sarah Cardell met with the Reeves last week to present ideas on how to stimulate growth and clearly, they fell short. Bokkerink, who served as Chairman of the CMA Board since September 2022, will be replaced as the CMA’s interim chair by Doug Gurr, a former Amazon executive who led the company’s UK business.
Context – Presenting the UK as a more reasonable regulator than the EU, and therefore an appealing market for business investment, was a theme of the pro-Brexit Conservative Governments. But their tech policies were schizophrenic. The UK DMCC parallels the EU’s DMA, the Online Safety Act is the UK take on the EU DSA, and the CMA was actively scrutinizing AI and Big Tech companies along with EU and US regulators. The Labor Party backed those laws. But AI is now a top government priority for tech investment, and the PM recently said that his government will offer investors “stability, pragmatism and the good sense they would expect from democratic British values.” Canning the Chair of the CMA sends a strong signal. But there is so much more to digital regulation than just AI. Plus, Trump seems intent on pushing the tech regulation climate so much farther in the investor direction than Biden ever considered that it will be harder to appear comparatively friendly.