CANBERRA, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) -- Australia's consumer watchdog has flagged regulations to address the growing power of digital media platforms such as Google and Facebook.
Rod Sims, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), said that "everything is on the table" as the body prepares to undertake a landmark inquiry assessing the impact of digital platforms on Australian media providers and advertisers.
The inquiry, which was ordered as part of a deal the government made with former Senator Nick Xenophon, will look into issues such as misuse of market power over 18 months.
"One problem we have is Facebook and Google have been very good at buying up people who could be their competitors and I think that is something the broader antitrust community has to keep an eye on ... WhatsApp and YouTube and things that could well have sprung up as competitors have been bought," Sims told News Corp Australia on Wednesday.
Sims' comments came one day after he announced the ACCC's compliance and enforcement priorities for 2018, including introducing larger fines for big businesses.
Under the current legislation, the maximum penalty for consumer breaches by a company will be increased from 1.1 million Australian dollars (866,000 U.S. dollars) to 10 million Australian dollars or 10 percent of total turnover.
"We really need much larger penalties for big companies when they mislead consumers as this can cause a lot of consumer harm and it has to be stopped," Sims said on Tuesday.
"For larger companies, we really need penalties of well above 100 million Australian dollars for those companies to get the message that this is behavior that they should not be engaged in."
