Fitbit Inc.

Which is amazing how ahead of the pack you were even with that as well.

Because when you think about wearables, everyone's got a Whoop or a Fitbit or whatever it may be, which is collating all of our data about our health and so on.

So

even today, like even some of the clinicals we're doing now, we're integrating with wearables because we know consumers are going to, if they see it, they'll believe it.

He has extensive experience in the tech sector, including advising major tech companies in investigations before the CMA and the European Commission.

He has worked on some of the defining tech cases of recent years, including Commission's Qualcomm exclusivity and predation cases, and mergers such as Google Fitbit, NVIDIA Arm, and Disney Fox.

In the UK, he has worked on the Witchclaw section against Qualcomm and advised the Merchant claimants in the interchange fee litigation before the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

Tom was named a future leader among competition economists by Alexology Index in both 2024 and 2025.

they seem to have their views and approaches quite strongly that way and but yeah you're right about consultations because in digital markets i suppose in each consultation round we get about 50 responses in some other fields like road transport you get thousands and civil servants that don't really have the capacity to deal with so many responses and then it just becomes a massive delay in implementation of the law and it is something that is inherent to the uk this consultation mechanism which I personally think it's quite great in terms of getting to the correct outcome with clear views, which is very democratic, but I suppose it is long.

I have a question on merger control now.

You worked for Google on the Fitbit case, which was cleared with 10 years of commitment.

Under the draft guidelines, with entrenchment now its own theory of harm, more emphasis on privacy as a competitive parameter and dynamic competition, do you think the picture would look slightly different if the Fitbit case were to have started now?

Like that's what heart rate variability monitors are purporting to do.

And that's why everybody's Apple watch and Fitbit is purportedly telling you that you're stressed or not is because they have, you know, like a sensor in there.

That's a, you know, it's a light sensitive diode that's measuring blood volume.

That's tracking your heart rate variability on aura ring, a Fitbit, you know, they're, they're giving you that data.

It's not necessarily accurate because the autonomic model underneath it is not accurate, but see, but that's very significant.

I got

ladies, I got 70 year old ladies who are in my yoga classes whose damn watches go off because I think they're monitoring their, their heart rates or whatever.

And, and, Didn't Grossman credibly call into question whether or not people should be wearing these darn Fitbit things at all? Well, now we're really