Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority is moving its digital markets regime from designation and rule-setting into a phase where interventions are expected to produce measurable changes across search, mobile software, cloud computing, and enterprise technology.

Will Hayter, the CMA’s executive director for digital markets, said on 7 September that the regulator now has three formal conduct requirements operating against Google in search, while parallel requirements covering Apple and Google’s mobile businesses are moving towards final decisions. Further work is expected around access to the NFC chip on iPhones and user-choice screens in search, following roadmaps the regulator set out last year.

The CMA has also agreed commitments with Apple and Google covering app-store review, app ranking, data use, and an interoperability process for Apple, all of which came into force on 1 April. Developers have started using the interoperability process, while Apple is due to publish its first annual transparency report and both companies are expected to provide their first compliance data by the end of September.

Individual interventions can appear highly technical, but the regulator is treating their effects as questions of market access. App developers depend on platform distribution and payment rules, publishers depend heavily on search traffic, fintech companies need access to smartphone hardware, and organisations buying cloud or enterprise software can incur substantial costs when technical or contractual barriers make switching difficult.

Cloud and AI pull competition into infrastructure

The regime is consequently extending beyond consumer-facing platform disputes. Amazon and Microsoft are participating in a voluntary CMA process covering cloud services, where the regulator says the companies have already made changes intended to improve interoperability and multi-cloud use, although formal strategic market status remains available if voluntary measures fail to produce sufficient progress.

Microsoft is also the subject of a wider investigation into its business-software ecosystem, which includes the unresolved question of cloud licensing. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in workplace software, the CMA is examining whether customers can combine services from different suppliers and whether licensing arrangements constrain the choice of cloud infrastructure on which those systems operate.

Hayter described cloud and AI-enabled business software as areas where competition increasingly intersects with sovereignty. Concentration affects more than price when companies or public bodies become heavily dependent on a small group of suppliers for cloud capacity, identity, productivity software, or AI tooling, because commercial switching costs can become an operational and strategic dependency.

That gives the digital markets regime a wider economic role than policing consumer platforms. Cloud expenditure runs through banks, retailers, software companies, manufacturers, and public services, while AI applications are increasingly sold as extensions of existing enterprise platforms, making the ability to move data, combine services, and negotiate licensing terms part of ordinary technology procurement.

Flexibility now needs evidence

The UK framework was designed to give the CMA more flexibility than a standardised rulebook, allowing it to use strategic market status designations, formal conduct requirements, commitments, and negotiated changes according to the market problem it is trying to address. Hayter defended that approach as pragmatic, although he also acknowledged that commitments are useful only if monitoring and enforcement show they are working.

That qualification becomes more important as the regime matures. Early commitments around app-store review procedures or interoperability may be relatively straightforward to measure, but disputes around search, AI-generated answers, platform fees, software licensing, and cloud switching involve competing commercial interests and can be harder to translate into a clean before-and-after test.

Publishers provide one example. The CMA has introduced a conduct requirement intended to improve negotiations between publishers and Google, while the debate around AI-generated search results has made control over content, traffic, and commercial terms more contentious across Europe. Google’s treatment of publisher opt-outs is also facing scrutiny in Brussels, illustrating how quickly competition questions are becoming entangled with AI product design.

Mobile markets present another version of the same problem because platform rules affect developers, payments businesses, and companies seeking access to hardware functions. The CMA is consulting on mobile steering requirements for Apple and Google, while planned work on NFC access could influence whether third-party services can compete directly with platform-controlled payment and identity tools.

The regulator also faces pressure from opposite directions. Large technology companies can argue that interventions impose costs, reduce incentives to invest, or force product changes that create security and privacy risks, while challengers and dependent businesses often argue that behavioural commitments are too slow or weak to offset entrenched platform advantages.

Hayter said proportionality does not mean timidity, but the next phase will require the CMA to demonstrate that intervention produces benefits that outweigh its costs. Compliance data, switching rates, developer access, customer choice, pricing, interoperability, and the behaviour of companies operating under the new rules will now carry more weight than the architecture of the regime itself.

Search requirements are operating, mobile decisions are approaching, cloud arrangements are being tested, and enterprise AI has entered the regulator’s field of view. The credibility of Britain’s digital markets regime will increasingly depend on whether those mechanisms alter market outcomes rather than merely adding another layer of technology regulation.