March 2025 final report31 Mar 2025
On 23 June 2025, the ACCC released the final report of the Digital Platform Services Inquiry.
The report examines the following 3 topics:
- recent international legislative and regulatory developments in digital competition regimes, unfair trading practices and dispute resolution
- major developments and key trends in online private messaging, app marketplaces and mobile operating systems, digital advertising technology services, and general online retail marketplaces
- potential and emerging competition and consumer issues in cloud computing, generative artificial intelligence, and online gaming.
The report reinforces the need for regulatory reform to address digital platform-related competition and consumer harms, and an economy-wide prohibition on unfair trading practices, as recommended in the September 2022 interim report of this Inquiry.
The report also recommends:
- the ACCC continue to have a monitoring function for emerging digital technologies under the proposed digital competition regime
- the Australian Government prioritise a whole-of-government approach to digital platform regulation and endorse the Digital Platform Regulators Forum (DP-REG) as a permanent forum.
See: Digital Platform Services Inquiry – March 2025 final report
Key findings from the final report
Issues paper
To inform the final report, the ACCC released an issues paper on 25 July 2024, seeking written submissions from interested parties to assist the ACCC in understanding the 3 topics being explored.
Submissions to issues paper
The ACCC received submissions in response to the issues set out in the issues paper from interested parties.