Competition Crunch

Happy Monday from officially the best place to live in Britain — although I am in London today.

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Happening Today 🗓️

Question time: Prime minister Keir Starmer will be asked anything and everything by senior MPs on the Liaison Committee at 2:30pm. The focus is international affairs but there will be some tech questions as Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, is among those quizzing him.

News In Brief 🩳

Ready to deploy: London-based Air Street Capital has raised $232m to invest in European and North American AI firms. It is the VC firm's third round and makes it the biggest solo general partner fund in Europe. Founder Nathan Benaich's previous investments include Synthesia, ElevenLabs and Wayve.

It's Brittin: Ex-Google boss Matt Brittin will be the new director general of the BBC, The Times reports. Brittin led Google in EMEA until 2024.

Monday cheer: Former prime minister Rishi Sunak, who now has advisory roles at Anthropic and Microsoft, has warned of AI causing "socially destructive, and politically destabilising, levels of unemployment", if jobs taxes aren't cut. Although AI companies themselves can't stop hiring, with the FT reporting OpenAI plans to double its global headcount this year.

Actually there is some good news: Cambridge researchers have developed a type of nanoelectronic device which could slash the energy consumed by AI hardware.

Face time: Darts wunderkid Luke Littler wants to trademark his face with the Intellectual Property Office to stop it being used by deepfakes.

Competition crunch

The CMA's board meets on Wednesday to decide what to do about the cloud market, but it has even more immediate priorities. The antitrust watchdog is under pressure from the Treasury to respond to rising fuel prices caused by the Iran War.

One big (tech) fight: Alongside reacting to the economic crisis, there are last-minute lobbying efforts on the CMA ahead of the decision on its cloud investigation. Amazon and Microsoft both argue that the UK cloud market is working well and no intervention is needed. Google, meanwhile, which has a smaller but growing share of the market, is urging the CMA to take action against its rivals.

Third time lucky: If its board decides to open a "strategic market status" investigation into Microsoft and Amazon on Wednesday, it will be the CMA's third since it was given new powers to intervene in digital markets - but work on its previous investigations is already falling behind.

Almost four years later: Take mobile browsers, which it's been investigating since 2022. Its inquiry initially found competition concerns in 2024, but in the CMA's draft annual plan for 2026/27 it is mentioned once in 24 pages.

Just browsing thanks: The regulator was meant to set out in the first half of this year its next steps to open up competition in mobile browsers, which is dominated by Apple and Google, but last month it only put forward voluntary commitments for the two companies to follow on mobile app stores, ignoring mobile browsers and browser engines. This is making companies like Mozilla, which has been lobbying for action, nervous.

Tracking it: Kush Amlani, Director of Global Competition at Mozilla, said he feared the Apple and Google example meant work on the second part of the investigation, which is meant to cover mobile browsers and browser engines, is being pushed back.

Yes, Iran, but: "We're worried that there are so many pressures being put on regulators that some important things might get missed," added Linda Griffin, Mozilla's VP of Global Policy. "But if you think about the bigger geopolitics, having a non-profit browser engine at the table, being able to compete fairly, is important for all of us."

Be more like EU: Mozilla is the only company outside of Google and Apple which runs and operates its own browser engine, Gecko, and Griffin argues that creates a "sovereignty" issue. It also has its own web browser, Firefox, which it said saw a 100 percent increase in daily active users in France and Germany when the EU introduced browser choice screens in 2024. This is Griffin's pitch:

"We're asking the CMA to implement what they spent three years looking at. We believe you can create a lot of benefits further down the line, especially when I think about things like agentic AI. Browsers are important, yesterday, today, and we think increasingly tomorrow, in terms of where the web is going. We really want to fix that infrastructure."

Spread thin: "Fixing" long-term competition concerns, dealing with the aftershocks of war and opening a new digital markets investigation means the CMA is under pressure on multiple fronts. Whatever it decides to do Wednesday, it will either upset Google or Amazon and Microsoft, but the work its digital markets unit has already spent years on needs to progress.

Monday Movers 👩‍💻

Get in touch to share your career updates. 

He's back: Henry de Zoete has returned to government as an adviser on investment and AI in DSIT where he’ll be working with the Sovereign AI Unit. The former SpAd also advised the Conservative government on AI and helped organise the Bletchley Park Summit in 2023.

Fergus Cameron Watt is the latest Global Counsel alumni to join FGS Global.

Help needed: The MoD wants a chief AI officer, while the CMA is looking for new panel members.

Sorry I didn't stay up: I've updated my report from Thursday March 19 on the Lords vote to regulate AI chatbots to reflect that government amendments also passed in a separate vote at 1am that morning. I promise to never go to bed again.

Back tomorrow,

Tom