UK government agency that enforces competition law and reviews mergers and markets for consumer and competitive harm.
Britain's CMA proposed on 16 October to give Microsoft strategic market status in business software, with a final decision due by 13 February 2027. It would let the regulator write conduct rules in advance instead of enforcing case by case.
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Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy says she is minded to intervene in Sky's £1.6bn takeover of ITV's media and entertainment arm. ITV and Sky have until 20 October to respond with reassurances on on-demand programming and news.
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Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Gold's Gym have been fined £6m in total by the CMA, with Wayfair's share at £4.8m. All three admitted breaking the law and took a 40% reduction for settling early, so each fine is a discounted figure.
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UK ministers have promised to regulate heating oil, a market 1.5 million households depend on, after prices nearly doubled in a year. The BBC reports no start date for the stricter rules and no sign of a price cap, so customers enter winter with the protections already in place.
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Google Maps now shows UK petrol and diesel prices drawn from the government's Fuel Finder feed. Google says it will leave off any price it cannot confirm is current, dev.to reported, so a station that reports late can appear on the map without one.
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Former CMA senior director Ann Pope is seeking about EUR 800 million from Visa and Mastercard for some 126,000 UK merchants over fees on EEA-issued cards. Her case rests on the payment regulator's finding that the schemes faced no effective competitive constraint when they raised those fees after Brexit.
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Sainsbury's, the UK's second-largest grocer, held merger talks with sixth-placed Morrisons from November to February before walking away. A competition ruling on Aldi and Lidl due this month will shape how many stores a revived deal would cost.
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Virgin Media O2 called BT's £400 million rescue of TalkTalk a stitch-up, days after the CMA said it could block Nexfibre's Netomnia deal. The CMA's objection there is that CityFibre, another challenger, would be squeezed out of wholesale competition.
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Sainsbury's held exploratory talks this year on a Morrisons merger that would have created a grocer with 23.6% of the UK market, the FT and Sky reported. Any revival would turn on whether the competition regulator accepted store sales as the price of approval.
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Google is on trial in London over claims its 30% Play Store fee overcharged 20 million UK consumers by up to £1.2 billion. Over nearly 11 years of purchases that comes to about £60 a head, for a fee Google agreed in March to cut under its settlement with Epic Games.
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Lisa Nandy has added vulnerable telecare users to the review of BT's £400m debt-free purchase of TalkTalk out of administration. Once the competition watchdog reports, she can weigh alarm safety and critical networks against BT's bigger market share.
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Lidl GB spent £315m on price cuts and promotions against pre-tax profit of £245.5m as its market share climbed past Morrisons. Deluxe grew only a little faster than the business as a whole, so Lidl's clearer edge over a slowing Aldi is its loyalty scheme.
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Britain's competition regulator has strengthened proposals that would put ChatGPT and Perplexity on Android and Chrome choice screens at setup and once a year after, with a final decision due by the end of 2026.
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Customs, AI disclosure, packaging and deforestation obligations land within months of each other across the EU, UK and US, and an Entrepreneur column argues they all test whether a company can prove what it knows about its own prices and products.
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The claim covers any free app funded by advertising and attaches £2 billion to five years of consent prompts, without saying how that figure was built or when London's tribunal will get around to hearing it.
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The claim treats App Tracking Transparency as an attribution problem for UK developers rather than a privacy setting, and it needs the tribunal to accept that Apple's own ad business never cleared the same bar.
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