On 11 November 2022, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) published the fifth report of its Digital Platform Services Inquiry.
Regarding consumer issues, the report recommends the submission of digital platforms to mandatory dispute resolution processes and more substantial requirements to fight against scams, harmful apps, and fake reviews, among others. There is also a recommendation for new laws that would require digital platforms to, among other issues, provide processes for reporting scams, harmful apps, and fake reviews, publish review verification processes, and ensure that consumers and small businesses can access appropriate dispute resolution.
The report also proposes mandatory codes of conduct for some digital platforms and services to address competition issues. Besides the consumer and competition recommendations, the report further highlights the ACCC’s support for prohibiting economy-wide unfair trading practices.
Mining of cryptocurrencies involves highly energy-intensive activities. While proponents argue that innovations like these add value to society, particularly in developing countries, critics question whether the benefits outweigh the high energy use of these new technologies and the social cost associated with increased carbon emissions.
A new paper published in Nature magazine provides economic estimates of the energy-related climate damage of Bitcoin (BTC) mining and explores criteria for indicating when this practice might become unsustainable. Using a global estimate of the location of BTC miners and the local electrical matrix, and regional coefficients of CO2 emission by generation type, the study concluded that there was an increase from 0.9 to 113 tonnes (t) CO2 per coin mined from 2016 to 2021. Considering that most cryptocurrency mining is powered by non-renewable sources, BTC climate damages increased during this period. The total global climate damage from all BTC mined between 2016 and 2021 is estimated at US$12 billion.
The paper presents three conclusions covering the period 2016-2021: (i) as the mining industry matured, climate damage from each BTC mined increased; (ii) in certain periods, BTC climate damages exceeded the price of each coin created; (iii) on average, each US$1 of BTC market value created was responsible for US$0.35 in global climate damage, which resembles the share of market price linked to beef production and crude oil burned.
The authors suggest that, in a hypothetical scenario where the share of renewable electricity sources for 2016-2021 was approximately 88.4%, the associated climate damages per coin mined would have dropped significantly.
Online choice architecture (OCA) describes the environment in which people act, including the presentation and placement of choices and the design of interfaces.
Published by UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) the discussion paper titled Online Choice Architecture: how digital design can harm competition and consumers provides an overview of OCA and its links with related concepts like ‘dark patterns’, the types of OCA practice that are prevalent, a taxonomy for OCA practices, and potential harms for consumers. The paper is illustrated by case studies of investigations conducted by CMA and others.
