Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what role the Digital Markets Unit will have in tackling monopolistic behaviour among tech companies in promoting news content.

In November last year, the government announced that it would establish a new pro-competition regime for digital markets. At the heart of that regime will be a mandatory code of conduct to govern the relationships between dominant firms and different groups of users that rely on their services, to promote fair trading, open choices and trust and transparency. It will cover the relationships between news publishers and platforms.

A non-statutory Digital Markets Unit (DMU) was established in April, housed in the CMA, to introduce, maintain and enforce the code of conduct. The Unit has begun to operationalise the new regime, and the Digital Secretary has asked it to work with the communications regulator Ofcom to look specifically at how a code of conduct would govern the relationships between platforms and content providers such as news publishers, including to ensure they are as fair and reasonable as possible.

We will consult on the form and function of the DMU this year, and legislate to put it on a statutory footing as soon as parliamentary time allows.