Big tech is still slugging Australian consumers with competitive behaviours that have been banned in the US and EU, consumer advocates say.
“Amazon in the European Union had been using dark pattern manipulative web design to keep subscribers as long as they possibly can,” said Erin Turner, advocate with the Consumer Policy Research Centre.
“They make it really easy to pay for Amazon Prime and really hard to unsubscribe,” Ms Turner said. The EU took action against Amazon introducing new legislation to ban such practices, but when CPRC looked locally they found something alarming.
“We looked at the Australian website and found they’re still using the designs and practices that the EU have banned,” Ms Turner said.
Ms Turner was speaking in response to the release of an interim report by the ACCC on its Digital Platform Services Inquiry. The report recommended action to protect Australians from online scams run through major platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also called for the government to introduce measures to ensure platforms did not engage in anti-competitive practices. Their ability to excercise market influence was highlighted by the ACCC in the following chart which shows how the digital giants make minnows of Australia’s largest companies.
Those measures include provision of user-friendly processes for reporting scams, harmful apps, and fake reviews, and demanded platforms respond to such reports.
To reduce the scope for scamming the ACCC also called for the verification of business users like advertisers, app developers and merchants and that platforms meet minimum internal dispute resolution standards.
Those obligations would be supported by the establishment of a new digital platform ombudsman scheme to resolve disputes that cannot be resolved internally.
The ACCC also “renewed its call for the introduction of unfair trading provisions in Australia,” Ms Turner said.
Currently there are a number of specific bans on unfair trading actions. “You can’t lie to customers, you can’t have an unfair contract, but there’s nothing stopping unfairness overall,” Ms Turner said.
“There really are some practices that are about businesses taking advantage and doing the wrong thing but they are legal because there is a gap in our law,” Ms Turner said.
Cybercrime is a growth industry
While platforms do have some protections in place at the moment they aren’t enough.
“What we’ve said in our submissions to the Inquiry is that the digital platforms really need to ramp up the work they’re doing to make sure that scams are killed off before they get to consumers and create consumer harm,” said Wayne Hawkings, director of inclusion at Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN).
Protecting members from scams would involve more engagement from the platforms.
“We would like to see them use a much better system of moderating what is allowed to go on their sites,” Mr Hawkings said.
That would make sure that malicious players are not able to use such platforms. Tighter regulation had been introduced in the US and EU methods of improving oversight are readily available from international regulators.
Big tech needed to drop the walls between them and their competitors to allow customers to more easily move between the two ACCAN found.
“If you’re on one platform and you want to engage with somebody on another platform you often can’t do that,” Mr Hawkings said.
For example, if you are on Apple Facetime you can’t communicate with someone on Facebook or WhatsApp. If platforms became truly consumer focused such commercial barriers would not be a reality.
“Another issue is that data is very difficult to transfer so data portability is another area we’d like to see some movement.”
That would allow photos, for example, to be easily transferred from one device or system to another.
In the area of digital advertising, the ACCC stressed that Google has a near monopoly. The giant dominates online advertising providing between 80 and 100 per cent of imprints for advertisers and publishers selling and buying advertising through its systems.
Advertising placement where ads accompanying Google searches need to be disconnected from commercial arrangements with Google so small business can more easily get better product placement, Mr Hawkings said.
