June 27, 2025 — Canberra
Australia’s competition watchdog has wrapped up a landmark five-year investigation into digital platform services, releasing its final report and recommending the Government make permanent a cross-agency regulatory forum to tackle the complex and evolving challenges posed by big tech.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) released the final report of its Digital Platform Services Inquiry (DPSI) on June 23, concluding a sweeping review into services offered by digital platforms from app marketplaces to artificial intelligence.
Across ten reports published since 2020, the inquiry made six key recommendations aimed at ensuring Australia’s digital economy remains fair, competitive, and trustworthy.
One of the major conclusions: a permanent role for the Digital Platform Regulators Forum (DP-REG)—a collaboration between the ACCC, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
In a joint statement, the four regulators backed the ACCC’s call for DP-REG to be formalised as a long-term body. “A whole-of-government approach to digital platform regulation is necessary to address the growing complexity of digital platform products and services,” the statement said.
DP-REG was formally launched in March 2022 to coordinate oversight of overlapping regulatory areas, including competition, consumer protection, privacy, media regulation, and online safety. Since then, it has produced joint working papers on the harms of algorithms, large language models, and multimodal foundation models. It has also made multiple submissions to government inquiries on issues ranging from AI regulation to the societal impacts of social media.
The ACCC’s final DPSI report drew on findings and research from other DP-REG members throughout the inquiry. For instance, it incorporated insights from eSafety’s 2021 report on teens’ digital lives and the OAIC’s 2023 privacy attitudes survey, as well as DP-REG’s joint work on generative AI.
According to the statement, enshrining DP-REG as a permanent structure would help regulators:
- Monitor and coordinate responses to cross-cutting digital technology developments
- Conduct joint research to inform government policy and reduce duplication
- Create a more cohesive and efficient regulatory approach to digital environments
The recommendation also aligns Australia with international best practices, such as the UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum.
With digital platforms becoming more deeply embedded in everyday life and global markets, regulators say coordinated oversight is not just a domestic need, but a global imperative.
