Inline Insights

Liz Truss is the new UK Prime Minister. Her premiership is likely to mean broad continuity with the previous government’s tech policy of making the UK a technology superpower, but with a renewed focus following the drift of the last few months of the Johnson premiership. This offers opportunities for tech firms, but they should be alert for a possible deterioration in UK-EU relations. In this blog we explore the impact of the new administration on the key tech policy areas.

The Queen’s Speech on 10 May 2022 outlines all the Bills that the Government intends to introduce in the new Parliamentary session. It includes substantial tech policy reforms in areas in which the UK is diverging from EU policy for the first time. While there are various initiatives, they can broadly be categorised as, first, pro-innovation and pro-competition measures, and secondly, changes to improve the protection of consumers of tech. Here we take you through the main proposals.

With the terms of the UK’s exit from the EU largely settled, the UK Government has begun to turn its attention to what it wishes to do with the powers that have been repatriated from the European Union. This blog explores the Government’s aspirations for the technology and digital sectors and its legislative plans to make the UK a global leader in this area.

The Internet of Things (IoT) was already expected to change the way we live and work long before COVID-19 began spreading around the globe in late 2019. After a year in which human to human contact has been necessarily constrained, contact between all manner of devices has become more important than ever. A growing amount of economic activity is taking place remotely, and whilst some of this may shift back to an “offline” mode once the pandemic recedes, the move towards a greater dependence on internet connected devices long predates the pandemic, and so will almost certainly outlast it.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to transform societies and economies. Such widespread transformation is bound to attract increased regulatory and legislative scrutiny. Here we explore the issues on which governments are most likely to focus their attention.

Covid-19 and the concerted push by European governments to develop contact-tracing apps has revealed the difficult trade-offs between privacy and public health. Like in previous debates, policymakers and Big Tech find themselves on opposite sides of the argument, although their roles have reversed, with US giants now positioning themselves as the guardians of their users’ privacy by refusing to facilitate centralised apps.

The spread of tiny chips into more and more everyday items promises a cumulative leap in convenience for consumers and productivity for businesses. Yet as ever more consumer devices become hooked up to the internet and the line between hardware and software blurs, the question of consumer protection and the need for new consumer regulations will receive greater attention.