Australia’s Competition Watchdog Calls for Urgent Digital Platform Reforms Amid Mounting Harms

Key Takeaways

• ACCC closes five-year inquiry: The Commission’s tenth and final report wraps a landmark investigation into digital platform services, calling for urgent reform.
• Consumers face unfair practices: 72% of surveyed Australians report experiences with misleading or manipulative design features while shopping online.
• Small businesses left vulnerable: Fake reviews, account suspensions, and lack of redress mechanisms continue to harm SMEs reliant on digital platforms.
• Competition risks are growing: The ACCC identifies self-preferencing, tying, and restricted interoperability as threats to market fairness.
• Emerging tech under scrutiny: The report highlights potential anticompetitive behavior in cloud computing and AI, calling for proactive regulation.

Deep Dive

In a parting shot that sounds more like a call to arms than a quiet policy recommendation, Australia’s competition watchdog has officially closed its five-year deep dive into digital platform services, and without regulatory reform, consumers and small businesses will keep getting steamrolled.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its tenth and final report on Monday, capping an inquiry that has examined everything from search engines and app stores to cloud computing and the rise of generative AI. While the ACCC acknowledges the benefits digital platforms have brought, greater connectivity, innovation, and business reach, it warns those upsides are increasingly outweighed by unchecked market power, manipulative design, and opaque algorithms.

“We’ve seen enough to know the current laws aren’t cutting it,” said ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb. “This isn’t about punishing success, it’s about making sure digital platforms don’t succeed at the expense of everyone else.”

Dark patterns and dead ends

The report pulls few punches. According to an ACCC-commissioned survey, nearly three-quarters of Australian consumers have encountered potentially unfair practices online, things like hidden fees, accidental subscriptions, or digital nudges that subtly steer users into costlier choices.

That figure alone would be troubling. But what’s perhaps more alarming is the lack of an effective way to resolve these issues. A staggering 82% of survey respondents said they want an external, independent dispute resolution body, a place to turn when the platform won’t budge.

Small businesses, too, are increasingly feeling boxed in. Whether it’s a fake review on a marketplace, a sudden account suspension on social media, or algorithmic opacity that buries their visibility, many are left with few options, and no clear line of appeal.

Cass-Gottlieb put it plainly, “A business that gets locked out of a platform is effectively locked out of its customers.”

Zooming out, the ACCC sees something bigger at play: a slow erosion of competitive dynamics in digital markets. It points to tactics like self-preferencing, tying, and restricting interoperability, the kinds of things that may not show up in your feed, but shape what you see, how you buy, and who gets to compete in the first place.

And the ACCC isn’t alone in ringing this bell. Similar concerns have led to digital market reforms in the EU, UK, Germany, and Japan. Australia, Cass-Gottlieb suggests, is overdue for its own “digital competition regime”, one that doesn’t just react to harm, but prevents it by setting proactive rules of the road for dominant players.

“The current toolkit wasn’t built for tech giants that touch every corner of the economy,” she said.

Cloud computing and AI: the next battleground

While much of the focus so far has been on social media, search, and online marketplaces, the ACCC’s final report also sets its sights on what’s coming next, and it doesn’t like what it sees.

In the cloud computing space, three names dominate: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These aren’t just cloud providers, they’re full-stack digital ecosystems with vertical integration across hardware, software, and increasingly, AI infrastructure.

That’s where the ACCC sees risk. These firms have the incentive and the means to bundle their own services across the tech stack, making it harder for rivals to compete on a level playing field. And with generative AI relying heavily on cloud infrastructure, there’s a real concern that big tech firms could tilt the playing field in favor of their own AI models, throttling competition before it even begins.

“The harms we’re talking about aren’t hypothetical,” said Cass-Gottlieb. “If left unchecked, this could mean higher prices, fewer choices, and slower innovation for Australians.”

Back in 2023, the Australian government said it agreed in principle with the ACCC’s push for a digital competition regime. It began consultations in late 2024. But so far, legislation has yet to materialize.

With this final report, the ACCC has effectively passed the baton. Whether lawmakers will pick it up, and how fast, remains to be seen. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and the digital economy isn’t going to regulate itself.

And in the ACCC’s view, Australia can’t afford to wait much longer.

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