Hello, welcome back to Emlex's weekly podcast with the latest big themes in regulatory affairs as seen by

Mlex's team of reporters around the globe. My name is James Panicki.

I'm from Emlex's Asia-Pacific team,

and it's great to have your company again this week.

And there's no theme bigger than the laws and rules affecting big tech companies,

in particular the Facebooks and the Googles of this world.

Mlex's coverage over the past five years has pointed to a growing sense among

lawmakers and observers in most jurisdictions that digital platforms have been under-regulated.

Rightly or wrongly, policy initiatives are suggesting that the safeguards built into competition,

consumer and privacy laws are no longer fit for purpose, and that competition

in new digital markets is being eroded by the platform's market power. These are the

concerns underpinning a new regulatory drive in the European Union, with the EU regulator,

the European Commission, proposing a new tool to investigate digital markets as well as a raft of

other initiatives. To walk us through these proposals are Lewis Crofts, Mlex's editor-in-chief,

and Nicholas Hurst, our chief correspondent for EU competition, and both of them join us from Brussels.

Lewis, we'll get to this proposed onslaught of EU regulation in just a moment, but what's

the problem the Commission is trying to solve here? The problem has really been building up for the

last 10 years, which is how to tackle big tech. There's long been a theory that companies grow and then

get toppled by the next generation.

The obvious example being MySpace, which all the kids used and then none of the kids used.

And overnight, Facebook and the likes arise and topple the titans of yesteryear.

But this isn't happening anymore.

...