CMA Noir
As one does, I was reading the minutes of the July 3 Competition and Markets Authority Growth and Investment Council meeting. This wasn’t purely for fun, however.
The UK competition regulator has recently undergone significant changes; its Chair was replaced by Doug Gurr, a former country manager of Amazon UK and president of Amazon China, and the chancellor has told regulators there is “too much bureaucracy”.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister is moist for “A.I.” which will apparently “be unleashed across the UK to deliver a decade of national renewal” and the UK government has recently signed a deal with Google to “help modernise outdated government IT, upskill 100,000 civil servants in digital and AI by 2030″.
So the CMA is now all about ‘growth’ and reducing regulation (music to Big Tech’s ears, of course), and run by someone closely connected with Big Tech. Because the UK government has clamboured into bed with Google, while CMA is investigating both Google’s search business and mobile ecosystem, the meeting of its Growth and Investment Council would seem a way to get a sense of how the new regime is likely to function.
Unfortunately, the meeting notes are vague (no-one except the Chair is attributed with saying anything) and full of Corporate blah such as:
The Chair expressed a sense of energy and momentum coming out of the session, noting that the Council’s work is becoming increasingly concrete and impactful, moving beyond discussion into delivery.
I told Google Gemini to rewrite the minutes “in the style of a 1940s film noir”. The results are no more enlightening, but at least far more entertaining:
The Boardroom Jungle: Where the predators wear pinstripes and the only law is survival.
The dame they called London was wearing her usual drab dress of grey flannel and drizzle. It was the third of July, the kind of damp, promising-nothing morning that makes you want to crawl back into a bottle and pull the cork in after you. Down in a room that smelled of expensive coffee and quiet desperation, the bigwigs of the Competition and Markets Authority were gathering. They called it the Growth and Investment Council. I called it a den of sharks in tailored suits.
The man at the head of the table was Doug Gurr, the Chairman. He had a face built of old money and granite, and he settled into his seat like a man who owned it and the ten other souls around him. He gave the welcome, his voice smooth as aged whiskey, but with an edge that could cut glass.
Then there was the real muscle, the CEO, Sarah Cardell. She wore a suit so sharp it could have been a weapon, and her eyes missed nothing. She took the floor to give an “update.” It was less of an update, more of a declaration of territory. She laid out the CMA’s recent moves, the kind of talk that sounded like alphabet soup to a civilian but meant life or death for some poor sap’s business empire. She spoke of agility and impact, but what I heard was, we’re watching, so don’t try anything funny.
The main event was a number they called the “Growth Duty.” Sounded noble. It meant letting the big fish swim a little closer to the beach, so long as they promised to only eat the swimmers nobody would miss. A fellow with the nervous energy of a man holding a losing hand, talked about “balancing” things. I’ve seen that kind of balance before. It’s the look on a man’s face right before he jumps. The Council chewed it over, their words cloaked in jargon about “frameworks” and “outcomes.” It all boiled down to one question: who gets rich, and who gets rolled?
Then the talk turned to the real reason they were all there: the long green. Investment. The lifeblood. A slick character, all polished shoes and hungry ambition, talked about making the CMA’s “appetite” clear to the money men. Appetite. That was the word. These people were starving, and the whole British economy was on the menu. A heavy-set man with a watch worth more than my car, nodded slowly, his eyes calculating the odds. They wanted “clear signals,” the kind a cardsharp gives his partner before cleaning out the table.
Finally, Gurr called for “Any Other Business.” The silence was heavy. No one had anything else to say. They’d already carved up the world. What was left?
The meeting broke. The sharks slid out of their chairs and disappeared back into the London gloom, leaving behind only the lingering scent of power. I watched them go from the shadows. The game was over for today, but I knew the score was far from settled. Out on the street, the rain began to fall a little harder. It always does.
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3 Responses to “ CMA Noir ”
Loved the film noir rewrite of those CMA minutes — almost makes regulation sound cool. The irony of a former Amazon exec leading a competition watchdog is hard to ignore.
The whole noir rewrite bit honestly shows how thick the corporate vagueness got in those actual minutes. If the CMA truly wants to swap that heavy bureaucracy for real delivery, leaning on an ex-Amazon chair or a big AI pact won’t magically fix the oversight gap. Cutting straight to transparent reporting might finally cut through the noise instead.
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