Time for Britain's CMA to strike hard – or risk losing the cloud competition fight The UK's ambition to become a global AI superpower hinges on a vibrant and competitive cloud market. The next few days will show if its competition regulator really appreciates both the pace of change and the scale of remedies needed to achieve both of these things. As the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) highlighted in …
Let’s be honest - the CMA isn’t about to save the UK’s digital future. This reads like bureaucratic theatre designed to show voters the government is doing something, while the real agenda - handing the UK’s digital infrastructure to foreign tax-shy giants - continues unchecked.
We’re told that “exit fees, vendor lock-in, and preferential licensing” are stifling innovation. Yet who exactly cemented this stranglehold? The government itself - by making AWS, Azure, and pals the default destination for public sector data. If these practices are so dangerous, maybe Whitehall should stop buying into them first. Lead by example, not by press release.
This isn't “market reform.” It’s a cynical performance. The same officials who crippled domestic providers with IR35, procurement rules, and hostile tax treatment now pretend to wring their hands over the dominance they actively created. Meanwhile, real competition - British, independent, and agile - was priced and legislated out years ago.
exactly! britain is a ponzi scheme setup to pump money upwards while services for the rest of us collapse, run by civil servants who don't know how to even turn a computer on! Activision should have been blocked, VMWare should have been blocked. ARM should never have been allowed to be sold off. vodafone & 3 should not have been allowed to merge.
How would you enforce no exit fees on Netflix? They use AWS and I’m sure they would be delighted to have no fees to pay for data out. Not sure exit fees is the right thing to focus on, otherwise it’s free internet bandwidth no?
Maybe they could focus on specific type of network traffic out? Replicated VMs or containers so that you have some portability?
No, don't be daft. I'm staggered anybody would even think this a valid question.
The last head of the CMA, Marcus Bokkerink, was given the boot by this government for (quite remarkably) not being "business friendly" enough, and replaced by Douglas Gurr, a former country manager for Amazon UK. Hmm, will he hold Amazon's feet to the fire? And with both Amazon and Microsoft making or promising multi-billion DC investments in the UK....?
Moreover, in recently updated guidance to the CMA, government set out priorities the CMA must consider, and the FIRST priority is "prioritising pro-growth and pro-investment interventions".
So again, no, the CMA will not hold ANYBODY's feet to the fire, if they're big tech, US companies, or any other multinational tax dodgers.
Even the whole EU cloud industry can't compete with AWS or Azure, never mind the UK.
Why? Because the reasons are exactly the same as for the UK:
a) they don't want to and they are too lazy, too slow, inept, and in the UK it'd end up as a digital version of HS2. It's easier to use "someone else's computer", regardless of data sovereignty
b) it needs masses of financial investment and spare hardware capacity
c) they don't have the imagination or business acumen. Remember Amazon was just a bookseller. EU businesses are one trick ponies
d) in the EU and UK it simply takes regulators, governments, and businesses too long to make decisions. JFDI is an alien concept and not invented here
That’s not a failure of imagination - it’s design. The UK doesn’t want a book seller to become a cloud giant. Any spare capital gets bled out via business rates, punitive taxes, and regulatory micromanagement. Try reinvesting? Good luck. Then the government takes your taxed-to-death revenue and hands it straight to AWS or Azure - and later whines that there’s no domestic competition.
This isn’t just economic sabotage - it’s institutionalised class suppression. In the UK, a bookseller daring to become a tech giant is seen as getting above their station. If you're not privately educated and clinking glasses at Whitehall dinners, your ambition is treated like a threat - and punished accordingly. The system’s designed to keep you in your place while pretending it's meritocratic.
That’s why we don’t get British Amazons. Not because we can’t - but because we’re not meant to.
exactly this!! in a country where Lord this or Lord that is still a thing.
You create something & the rules will bloody well make sure you can't build anything!
even without a business, IT guys used to drive ferraris. CAN'T have that! offshore it and throw in a few million visas to decimate wages and jobs.
care homes and schools too good? sell em off to private equity!!
someone in the UK getting too inventive, ensure that they can be sold off too. the uk must own nothing, create nothing & earn as little as possible while as much of that cash gets pumped to foreign firms & the useless royals!
tax breaks and tax incentives for companies that offshore all their profit & ensure that the laws aren't changed so that massive US & Indian multinationals can outbid & out perform UK small firms every time. introduce laws and rules that are pocket change to large fitms to follow but devastating to small firms.
and when it all goes pear shaped, ensure that these same tax avoiding firms will get buckets of tax payer cash to ensure they aren't affected by their own screw ups.
genuinely don't understand the fuckwittery! If a US firm is going to "invest" a £billion into the economy, they're only doing it because they know they get £2 billion out. EVERY piece of "inward investment" is a con & a net loss. either in real cash or lost knowledge.
#fucktheking
For decades the UK has rolled out toothless regulators which only really exist to give an appearance of "doing something"(*) or worse, had trade associations wrap themselves in the cloak of "industry self-regulation", then calling themselves regulators and making out that they have a government mandate (ASA, ICSTIS/PPP, etc), in order to avoid the government stepping in and regulating sectors which really _DO_ need regulation rather than "old boys' clubs"
Thanks to Brexit it may be forced to actually make these regulators and quangos fit for purpose. It's a faint hope but it's at least a hope
(*) That works when inside the EU because a government can't be forced to enforce its laws without embarking on an elephant-breeding exercise. Once outside the EU, it can be a matter of "Do it to our satisfaction or you don't get trade access" (Whether said by the EU, USA, China or one of the three other large economic players)
"Thanks to Brexit it may be forced to actually make these regulators and quangos fit for purpose. It's a faint hope but it's at least a hope"
And it's an ill-founded hope.
I'm a regulator and a civil servant, and there's currently a unicorn hunt been started in all UK regulators at the behest of HMT to reduce the administrative burden on business of regulation by around 25%. Of itself that's admirable, excepting that (a) governments of all persuasions have been prattling on about reducing regulation for about thirty years* with few perceptible benefits, and (b) there's no baseline or accurate measure of what that burden is, and (c) government have been clear that they want regulators to reduce their burden on business, but politicians don't intend to actually remove or reform any statute law.
Which of those counts most? That they've tried this since forever and its never worked before, that they don't know what the 100% that they want to reduce to 75% is, or that all of the rules remain in place? I'd say they're all equally important in guaranteeing that the crusade will fail. Even whilst promising to reduce the burden of regulation, the apparatus of state continues to roll more into (e.g.) minimum wage, employee entitlements, NI costs, pension obligations, stillbirth leave etc etc and that mindset is not changing. Pointless garbage reporting like corporate environmental disclosures, modern slavery reporting, or equal pay reporting** will all remain. But apparently just by telling regulators to ask fewer questions of business the government think that they'll save business around £5bn*** a year.
There's a huge conflict between what ministers want and what can be delivered, the civil service is poor at offering good, practical solutions to ministers, the civil service has too many dossers amongst the Senior Civil Service, and said SCS are simply not held to account when things go wrong. If government want regulation to cost business less, then THEY need to remove some even many of the regulations they've passed, they need to bash the civil service into modernity, and when setting targets to reduce something they need to have an accurate idea of what that something is.
* e.g. The Better Regulation Task Force of 1997, the Bonfire of the Quango's in 2010, the Growth Duty in 2013 and since, plus others.
** There are regulations in place, just enforce those rather than wasting every law-abiding companies time and resources having to report that they're not breaking the law.
*** I did say no baseline; To be fair somebody did take a "plucked from my arse" estimate from 2015, inflated it by an arbitrary amount, and came up with the idea that regulators currently cost business around £25bn a year. Assuming a fully loaded average labour cost of £52k, that would imply that 480,000 FTE of private sector do NOTHING but fill in forms for regulators. Like 'em or loathe 'em, how credible do you think that is?
“480,000 FTE of private sector do NOTHING but fill in forms for regulators. Like 'em or loathe 'em, how credible do you think that is?”
I’ll suggest at least this data-point: it just so happens we’re having some building work done. It’s moderately complex in admin terms (planning permission, building control and other items), but more to the point it’s not our day-job so we’re contracting that bit out, to be sure it’s done correctly. Price is flat-rate 8% on the actual building works cost, which might or might not be on the high side, but it’s not so far off industry norms. That literally covers *only* private-sector admin to Councils, none of the building works or organisation.
So there you are, the answer is “for the constructio industry, about 8% of the private sector workforce is engaged in form-filling for the government”.
Now, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong in that. Grenfell Tower, for example, could have done with a lot more regulatory oversight.
Similarly, schools spend weeks preparing for an Ofsted visit. GP surgeries, hospitals and care homes spend huge amounts of their time documenting, and preparing for Care Quality Commission. And the food industry. And railways. While only maybe a quarter of the economy is heavily regulated, that which is might well spend 10% of its total time on “regulatory admin” or more.
Honestly, an estimate that 1.3% of the workforce is doing this, neither surprises me and is probably on the low side.
None of this is necessarily waste. It all depends whether it’s producing Safety or Safety Theatre. Grenfell still happened. Our Care Homes are horrible places despite the CQC.
What is a bit shocking though, is that you as a regulator are entirely clueless about the size of the imposed load. That’s a horror story.
None of this is necessarily waste. It all depends whether it’s producing Safety or Safety Theatre. Grenfell still happened. Our Care Homes are horrible places despite the CQC.
Therein is the problem of assessing regulators. As it happens the whole environment and planning space is the poster child for red tape, so to extrapolate that to other regulators is unsound. I work for a regulator that has accountability across a huge swathe of Britain's economy, chances are you'd not name us unprompted. We require ZERO paperwork from most businesses we regulate, our total cost is fractions of a fraction of one percent of the turnover of those businesses, and most of the time things work as they should. Sometimes they don't, invariably because somebody isn't following the rules, then we or other agencies get involved after the event, after the damage has been done.
Yet, even so what bad things might have happened if we'd not even had the inadequate levels of regulation that pertained at the time of Grenfell? What would be the state of care homes without CQC? People notice only when things go wrong. When things go right (ish) all that happens is the Daily Vile readers complain about red tape and bureaucrats.
What is a bit shocking though, is that you as a regulator are entirely clueless about the size of the imposed load. That’s a horror story.
Well, you might care to de-personalise your attack. I'm presenting you with the facts as I see them, I'm not happier than you are that government can't answer the basic question of what the costs to business of regulation are. Largely that is a political matter - when a minister introduces a new policy or a new law, there needs to be an impact assessment, reviewed by the Regulatory Policy Committee. But because ministers simply want their law passing, they aren't interested in accurate but unfavourable analysis, so the impact assessment is always slated to favour the policy, usually by downplaying any negatives or costs, or exaggerating the benefits. As regulators, we don't make policy*, so you'll have to place the blame on ministers.
And here you also see why most regulators are some form of arms-length body, so that politicians can shriek that every failing is the fault of regulators, not the fault of shit-headed policy making, and regulations designed and written by people that should be allowed out without adult supervision.
* A tiny number of regulators do, but none you'll be familiar with, these are where a regulator is part of a government department rather than a quango.
I think your first point is that your specific regulator does not in fact impose significant load. That may well be true. But you seem to have taken the *overall* goal of reduction as targeted at your org. If its implemented blanket reduction, thats crap, but it doesn’t mean the overall govt request is wrong. And as I said, I don’t regard a 1.3% imposed load *in itself* as unjustifiably large, or shouldnt be reduced. There should be an honest impact analysis.
The worst argument ever, and a very common one, is “Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done”. If you’re doing “something” but it’s not effective then yes stop doing it. It’s simply not true that doing something is better than nothing.
“Well, you might care to de-personalise your attack.”
Apologies that it came across that way. I should have better said: “It is shocking to discover that a basic part of standard regulator process, and govt process of instructing the regulator, does not include both an estimate of imposed load, effective targets for that load, and ongoing monitoring of that load”.
For decades the UK has rolled out toothless regulators which only really exist to give an appearance of "doing something"
Unfortunately the current government's solution is to nationalise the industries which the inept regulators have so signally failed to regulate (Thames Water is an obvious example).
That just means that the same people who were so inept at supervising the businesses will now become responsible for running them completely.
What could possibly go wrong?
redundant for all the good it has done.
Google, MS, AMAZON and the rest have this cloud crap sewn up tight.
Time for the UK Gov to tax them dearly otherwise, we are truly FSCK'd as a country.
Lets face it people, we are broke. Just like when Gordo Brown stopped being PM. We can't go on like this forever and before anyone pipes up, Farage and Reform are merely Trump/MAGA light.
CMA may come to damning conclusion on current state of play, but the Government is so weak and will bend over and take it, while the corrupt senior Civil Service masters are bed hoping with the tax shy megacorps for their next pay packet, nothing will get done, just waffle, promise, smoke and mirrors, business as usual.
Quote: "...a truly competitive cloud landscape..."
Yup.....just like the "truly competitive landscape" on the desktop!! I don't know the numbers, but is it not 90%++ from our friends in Redmond, WA?
Then take a look at other so called "regulators"......the news in the last few days is that Ofwat is going to be scrapped!! Because they were not doing ANY REGULATING at all!!
Then there's Ofcom. Link: https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/royal_free_deepmind_representative_action_uk/
Complete shambles from 2017 onwards.....Google/Deepmind slurp 1.6 million citizen medical records from the Royal Free. Not one citizen gave their permission. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING DONE!
....and so on. Regulation has a very limited meaning in SW1.....it means politicians get in front of video cameras and state "We are doing something". AND THEN THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NO ENFORCEMENT.....no budget......toothless "regulator"........until the next video opportunity!!
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