The new regime came into force on 1 January, enabling the Competition and Markets Authority to designate firms with strategic market status and to impose tailored conduct requirements or pro-competition interventions.
It is a bespoke regime rather than a general rule, which means the effects will arrive company by company rather than all at once.
The business thought
For startups dependent on app stores, search, marketplaces or mobile ecosystems, platform rules are existential product inputs rather than terms of service.
Regulatory intervention may open routes to customers. It may equally alter APIs, pricing and compliance obligations at short notice, and a business built on the previous arrangement will absorb that either way.
The practical watch
Track dependency risk explicitly: what percentage of acquisition, revenue and service delivery runs through each platform. Most companies have never written that number down.
Maintain a credible second channel before regulation or platform policy forces the question. Building one under pressure is considerably more expensive.
Related reading
- Manchesterism goes national: what a Burnham government could mean for founders outside London
- Digital markets and consumer enforcement became a board-level issue
- The UK chose a regulator-led, principles-based approach to AI
Source: CMA, digital markets regime comes into force.