Discussion Document: Personal Online Communication Services

In September 2022 we published our approach to digital markets in the communications sector, where we announced a programme of work to examine how digital markets are working for UK consumers and businesses.

As the UK’s converged communications regulator, we consider it to be important to take a high-level look at competition and consumer issues in the personal online communications services (OCS) sector and its impact on traditional calling and messaging markets.

This work aims to increase our knowledge and understanding of these services, and to provide evidence-based thinking, through the lens of our existing competition and consumer protection duties in telecommunications markets. We note that this work is therefore specific in its focus and explicitly does not look at issues covered under the online safety regime.

Reports

Discussion Document: Personal online communication services (PDF, 1.2 MB)

YouGov Ofcom online communication services management summary (2023) (PDF, 672.7 KB)

YouGov Ofcom online communication services data tables (2023) (XLSX, 651.9 KB)