This legislation will not only support specialist publishers and the creative industries to build thriving online businesses, but will also save millions of consumers money. We will now work with government to ensure that the detail of the legislation is as effective as possible, and with the DMU itself to develop codes of conduct that will go to the root of big tech’s anticompetitive practices.

To note, this legislation will also bring in new regulations on the selling of subscription contracts. PPA has been successful in having several measures that would have had a highly detrimental impact on subscriptions ‘churn’ removed. We are now looking to facilitate engagement between experts within our membership and government in order that civil servants have a proper understanding of how subscriptions businesses work in practice.

In another key announcement, the government has decided not to introduce an Online Sales Tax (OST), an idea put forward by certain stakeholders in the context of Business Rates reform. The government’s decision reflects concerns raised about an OST’s complexity and the risk of creating unintended distortion or unfair outcomes between different business models.

An OST would have reduced publishers’ subscriptions revenues and created huge complexity in the process, so it is good to see that these concerns have been acknowledged and the policy abandoned.