Department for Innovation, Business and Skills Consultation on Private Actions In Competition Law : Our Response

Overall we find the consultation raises important issues for SMEs and consumers and is particularly relevant for providing effective measures to resist market concentration.

As well as looking for an opportunity to enable specific redress we believe that effective mechanisms for private action:

• provide an institutional response to the actions and behaviours, intentional or otherwise, of large undertakings in direct or parallel markets affecting F/OSS services.
• will lead automatically to better working and more effective markets.

Cabinet Office Open Standards Consultation: Our Response

Much of our research and analysis is contained in our recently published report on the importance of royalty free standards in public sector ICT.

Overall we find the consultation to be poorly framed and fails to identify:

• The effects of the existing policy (the problem identified)
• The absence of a single formal document delineating the scope of policy relating to the specification and implementation of ICT in the public sector cannot be taken to infer that there is not an existing policy as represented by the sum total of procedure, custom and practice (commission or omission).
• The intentions of a new policy (the solution proposed)
• Government should seek to identify the interacting nature of its policy choices and account for their effects.

We are unaware of any economic assessment undertaken in preparation for this consultation and government cannot easily second-guess these values. Such absence might explain the lack of any sense of urgency, neither any proposals for action nor for implementation.

Open Standards for Open Government

On Monday 30 April Policy Exchange held an even Open standards for open government?

We were pleased to have supported the event

Fellow speakers Adam Afriyrie MP (middle) and Chris Francis, IBM (right) looked happy too.

Policy Exchange have posted the video

Open Standards for Open Government?

Monday 30 April 2012, London

The Policy Exchange is holding an open event discussing the role of open standards in UK public policy: Open standards for open government?

Speakers:

• Adam Afriyie MP | Shadow Minister for Science and Innovation, 2007-2010 | Chair of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, and President of the Conservative Technology Forum
• Dr Chris Francis | Technical Relations, IBM
• Stephen Mutkoski | Worldwide Policy Director, International Government Affairs, Microsoft
• Phil Archer | Technology and Society, W3C
• Gerry Gavigan | Chair of the Open Source Consortium
• Chaired by Chris Yiu | Head of the Digital Government Unit at Policy Exchange

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