Competition and Markets Authority

The Competition and Markets Authority is the UK's national competition regulator, responsible for merger control, market investigation, and competition enforcement. Its cloud services market investigation produced an estimate that UK organisations waste £500m a year on cloud services due to lock-in, switching costs, and project overruns, a figure cited by the Open Rights Group in its April 2026 national security report. The CMA's cloud investigation closed in July 2025 without binding remedies; unlike the European Commission's Digital Markets Act, the CMA's market investigation tools are advisory in the absence of DMA-equivalent UK legislation.

The CMA is now active on two fronts in media and tech. In the Sky/ITV deal, it must clear Sky's proposed £1.6bn acquisition of ITV's Media & Entertainment division (broadcast channels plus the ITVX streaming platform), alongside a reciprocal element where ITV Studios would buy a Sky production-rights unit. The deal also requires Ofcom clearance. Separately, the CMA monitors the AI sector, where the EU is preparing its first DMA self-preferencing fine against Google in the high triple-digit million euro range, illustrating the enforcement gap with Brussels that the CMA's advisory-only cloud outcome Left unaddressed.

The structural contradiction identified by the Open Rights Group remains unresolved: Britain is spending the equivalent of its entire sovereign AI fund every year on cloud lock-in, with no cloud-layer instrument to address it. The gap between the CMA's £500m cloud-waste figure and the UK Sovereign AI Fund's £500m total commitment is the central tension in the UK's tech-sovereignty debate.