ACCC enters strange new worlds
Welcome to a Friday update from Unmade.
Today: The ACCC puts Amazon and Microsoft into its sights, and another bad day to own SCA shares.
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The ACCC’s five-year mission may last forever
For the most part, the Coalition years will be seen as wasted ones when it comes to policy thinking around the media landscape.
The major exception is the Digital Platforms Inquiry, instituted at the end of 2017 by the Malcolm Turnbull government under the auspices of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission. It’s one of the few examples where then Treasurer and later PM Scott Morrison helped create something of substance.
The initial Digital Platforms Inquiry, which began in December 2017, was succeeded by the Digital Platform Services Inquiry in 2020, with a remit to run until 2025.
Over the last five years, the ACCC has amassed world leading expertise on the workings of the major digital platforms and has influenced policy setting and regulation.
That included the even now, two years on, astonishing outcome of the News Media Bargaining Code, which saw Google and Facebook strong-armed into giving money to publishers. It was a policy which influenced regulators around the world.
The ACCC’s exploration of the advertising part of the equation may not have created the same real world outcomes - yet - but it was similarly authoritative in building up an understanding of just how much of a stranglehold Google and parent company Alphabet has taken on the trading of programmatic advertising.
And now the ACCC is turning to the wider digital ecosystem. It published its initial issues paper this week.
While Alphabet and Facebook’s parent company Meta are still in the crosshairs, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are added into the mix.
The ultimate questions will still be global ones: Surely there’d be much better competition in search if Alphabet was forced to sell YouTube and have it create its own search engine; does the Amazon Prime Video service need to be owned by the world’s biggest digital retailer, who also happens to power most of our digital infrastructure via Amazon Web Services?; can we trust the people behind the goddawful Teams not to ruin ChatGPT?
In the same way Star Trek’s original five year mission “to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before” has so far lasted 56 years, there’s a likelihood that the ACCC’s Digital Platform Services Inquiry will become more than a five year mission.
It’s only in the last few months that the impact of artificial intelligence has moved to the top of the agenda. Yet in this week’s issues paper, AI is prominent in the areas the ACCC says it is exploring.
Here’s a coincidence for you. Malcolm Turnbull called that original inquiry on December 4, 2017. That happened to also be the very same day that Amazon officially launched in Australia. As we wrote earlier this week in Tuesdata, it took just five years for Amazon to become the biggest online retailer in Australia.
Amazon is well on the way to becoming the biggest retail media network player too.
The ACCC has a lot to untangle.
A bad day for SCA while rest of The Unmade Index heads up
The Unmade Index of ASX listed media and marketing stocks had a mostly good day on Thursday, rising by 0.68%
The only broadcaster that missed out on the uplift was Southern Cross Austereo, which fell by 3.52% to 96c, the first time this year it has traded below $1 per share. SCA stocks have now now lost 17.2% over the last month, taking the company’s market capitalisation down to just $234m. The company is once again trading close to its all time low of 88c.
Time to leave you to your end-of-week triumphs and disasters.
I’ll be back tomorrow with Best of the Week.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
