Hello and welcome to another M-Lex podcast. Today we're coming to you from Australia, where last

week's release of the final report of a groundbreaking probe into the impact of digital platforms, Facebook and Google,

is continuing to reverberate both locally and internationally.

I'm James Panicki, M-Lex's Australasian Managing Editor.

I'm in Melbourne, and I've been following the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's

Digital Platforms Inquiry since it was announced in December 2017.

And with me for most of that way has been Laurel Henning, MLEX's senior reporter,

who joins us now from our Sydney offices.

Hello, Laurel.

Hi, James.

This week, we thought we would walk our listeners through the recommendations of the ACC's final report.

Some of those recommendations touch on Mlex's core business, including competition and data privacy. Other areas such as the platform's impact on the media industry are a bit outside our comfort zone,

but we'll zip through those as well given that the competition considerations appear

to underpin most of this report. Now Laurel the one takeaway for our listeners is that the

ACC has concluded that both Facebook and Google do have market power in Australia. That

conclusion had always been on the cards. It was contained in the interim report in December.

As to whether the platforms have abused that market power, well, the ACC says its mandate was never to delve into that particular issue.

But the recommendations do work on the assumption that the market power that is held by the platforms is real,

it's dangerous, and it needs to be matched by tough regulation.

That's right. There are 23 recommendations in the ACC's final report,

and of those 23, 8 are similar to the draft report that we saw at Christmas,

and two vary proposals in its draft

...