Australia is moving on a digital competition regime aimed at app stores and ad tech, alongside GDPR-style privacy reform and doubled penalties for misleading conduct. The compliance bar for marketers is rising.
The era of collecting whatever you could grab and sorting out consent later is ending. Privacy is becoming a cost of doing business, not an afterthought.
The regulatory ground under Australian marketing is shifting. The government is consulting on a new digital competition regime that gives the ACCC power to designate and monitor dominant platforms, with an initial focus on app stores and ad tech. Alongside it, the ACCC continues to push for privacy reform that moves Australia closer to GDPR-style rules, including higher standards for consent, clearer privacy notices and rights for people to have their data erased.
The enforcement side is hardening too. In March, the government announced that penalties for false or misleading conduct will double from $50 million to $100 million per contravention. The direction is one way. More scrutiny of how platforms operate, and more scrutiny of how businesses collect and use data.
Why it matters
This lands right on top of the signal-loss problem. Marketers already losing measurement to cookie deprecation now face tighter rules on the first-party data they were told to lean on instead. The businesses that treat consent as a box to tick will get caught short. The ones that build clean, consented data practices now will have an asset that holds up as the rules tighten.
There is a claims angle too. Doubled penalties for misleading conduct means the copy in your ads matters more, not less. Greenwashing and inflated claims are squarely in the regulator's sights.
The new maximum penalty per contravention for false or misleading conduct, doubled from A$50 million
What to do about it
Get your consent and privacy practices current now, because retrofitting them after a rule change is far more expensive than building them in. Treat first-party data collection as something that must be done with clear, informed consent, not quietly. Review your advertising claims, especially anything about sustainability or performance, against the doubled-penalty reality. Keep records of how you collect and use customer data, since proving compliance is becoming part of the job. Watch the digital competition regime as it develops, because changes to how platforms operate will ripple into how you buy media.
The rules are tightening on both how you reach people and how you handle their data. Build for that now, not when the letter arrives.