Issues in the UK’s forthcoming Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill

In an attempt to strengthen digital competition regulation in the UK, the Government confirmed its approach to the new competition regime on 6 May 2022.[1] Now, the UK is on the verge of publishing the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill which will be broadly aligned with the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The question that…

Saving the WWW from the W3C

When Tim Berners-Lee created a system that used hypertext links to retrieve research papers at his research institute in Switzerland in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s he probably never thought his insight would spawn a worldwide commercial network. 30 years later we can see that people’s daily lives have been changed by the internet…

New telecoms security regulations and a Code of Practice set to be in place on 1 October 2022

The United Kingdom government wants to have new telecoms security regulations – together with a code of practice.  These will apply to network and service providers. The relevant department – the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport – conducted a consultation exercise for these new regulations and the code of practice from March to…

Transparency matters: WhatsApp fined EUR 225 million for violating transparency obligations under the GDPR

On 2nd September 2021 the Irish Data Protection Commission (”DPC”) imposed its biggest fine to date on WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. In its reasoning (available here) the DPC considered both: the information provided by WhatsApp to its users, and perhaps more importantly  the lack of information provided to non-users.  Namely, it was…

ICO Consultation for the UK Replacement of the Standard Contractual Clauses

On 11 August 2021, the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) published a consultation regarding its draft guidance for international transfers of personal data (“Guidance”), as well as associated data transfer tools which serve to replace Standard Contractual Clauses (“SCC”). The ICO’s post-Brexit data protection actions include these new documents, which are subject to consultation: Proposals aimed…