Hold on, Labour just appointed the former head of tech monopoly Amazon to lead… the competition watchdog

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer has appointed the former UK head of monopoly Amazon to lead the Competition and Markets Authority. In a letter to Rachel Reeves, tech firms such as Mozilla (owner of Firefox), publishers, and others have raised concerns that the appointment of Doug Gurr stifles the independence of the watchdog.

Doug Gurr: cozying up to the Labour Party

US counterpart regulator the Federal Trade Commission began conducting a lawsuit against Amazon in 2023 for allegedly running an illegal monopoly. The authority argues Amazon stifles competition through downranking sellers on its marketplace that also sell their goods elsewhere.

Yet Labour has appointed the former Amazon UK boss to head Britain’s competition watchdog. That’s probably worse than appointing the former editor of the Daily Mail to the Editors’ Code Committee.

Oh wait, that happened.

Gurr was head of Amazon UK from 2016-2020.

Amazon: “protecting their monopoly rents”

In the letter, seen by the Guardian, the authors which also included the deputy chair of the enforcement decision-making committee at the Bank of England said:

Following the removal of the CMA chair, and his replacement with a former Amazon executive, we are worried that the UK government is losing sight of its commitment to robust competition enforcement of the digital markets unit (DMU) regime and the CMA’s operational independence

The CMA’s independence must be rigorously defended if it is to pursue its mission in the face of aggressive lobbying from tech companies and other vested interests, whose sole aim is to defend the moats protecting their monopoly rents.

The Labour party has long supported the need for robust and urgent action to tackle monopolisation of the UK’s tech sector.

Additionally, founder and director of We Own It Cat Hobbs said:

It’s actually dystopian that the government is putting an ex-Amazon boss in charge of the Competition and Markets Authority… It’s dangerous to have a Prime Minister who kowtows to giant corporations like Blackstone and Amazon thinking they are the only way we can get investment, ignoring other options like a wealth tax and direct, cheaper public sector investment for growth.

In September, Reeves announced she had secured £8bn of investment from Amazon Web Services. Does ‘growth’ mean growing crony capitalist bank balances?

An estimate of 86% of people use Amazon in the UK and 70% use it at least once a month – it’s a clear monopoly. And the corporation imposes a private tax of up to 15% on sellers for, not much, really. James Muldoon, author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, argues that platforms like it are digital infrastructure that should be publicly accountable.

Featured image via the Canary