Comyn lashes low scrutiny of tech giants’ ‘economic miracle’ returns

Mr Comyn’s comments, unusually frank for a top banking executive, came after Mr Costello described Apple’s peers Google and Meta as “monopolies on a global scale that would make Rockefeller blush”. That was a reference to the founder of Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry in the late 1800s and triggered the creation of antitrust laws.

Mr Costello is the chairman of Nine Entertainment, the publisher of The Australian Financial Review. Nine and other major media groups are pushing for the government to force Meta to pay to use news content after the owner of Facebook said it would pull out of those agreements.

“The [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] said that these were global monopolies that needed to be subject to regulation to ensure that you could have proper negotiation with them,” Mr Costello said.

Meta’s decision to stop paying news publishers about $70 million a year for content when existing deals expire this year was “quite an existential moment for Australian media,” he added.

“If our media goes the way of everybody being drawn onto the platforms with free content, unedited content, being put up on it, then you won’t have anybody investing in reputable media … it is a very, very important issue that I would say everybody in this room has an enormous interest in the outcome”.

Similarly, Mr Comyn said Apple’s attempt to dodge regulations in Europe showed the company was the “undisputed world champions of kabuki theatre”, a reference to the highly stylised Japanese performance art.

European regulators are considering forcing Apple to provide banks with access to the functionality on iPhones that would allow them to make payments directly from banking apps. Mr Comyn said parliament needs to pass laws to give the Reserve Bank new powers over global technology companies entering the banking sector through payments. These groups had a “very sophisticated” and “very deliberate” approach to avoid the regulation that applies to lenders.

In a later session, Macquarie Group CEO Shemara Wikramanayake said the US and rest of the world “does need to allow other competition to come in” against the big tech players, but she declined to back-up Mr Comyn’s call for more regulation. “For us, for now, we just work with them,” she said.

AustralianSuper boss Paul Schroder said given the amount of profit the ‘Magnificent Seven’ US tech stocks are making, “we need to work out where what our exposure should be to those companies”.

“If you haven’t got one, you want one. If you are one, you want to stay one. And if you’re not one yet, you want to be one,” he added.

Mr Comyn has been warning policymakers for several years about Apple’s increasing power in the financial services sector. He began a campaign for parliament to regulate Apple Pay in mid-2021, accusing it of free-riding on banks’ investment in the payments system. Mr Comyn has also suggested Apple is acting as an economic “gatekeeper” by controlling critical economic infrastructure that iPhones have become.

Apple has told Treasury the proposed changes to the payment law are “not a proportionate nor evidence-based regulatory response” for its services, which it says are simply a digital presentation of a physical card.

Apple has reiterated it has a “limited role in payment systems” and no material risks relating to Apple Pay have been identified that would make regulatory intervention necessary.