Principales desarrollos en la ley de competencia y política 2025

Introduction

In 2025, Korean competition law, the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act (MRFTA), continued to operate as not merely a dormant statute on the books, but a living and forceful instrument of public enforcement. The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) made vigorous use of the MRFTA's institutional capacity, through assertive enforcement—at times arguably over-assertive—as well as through competition advocacy beyond sanctions. At the same time, the Korean Prosecution Service (KPS) increasingly emerged as a parallel public enforcer, particularly in cartel matters, acting in competition with the KFTC. As enforcement activity intensified, the Supreme Court of Korea played a more visible moderating role through judicial review—sometimes acting as a brake on overreach, and at other times as an accelerator of enforcement. Against that backdrop, this article examines several notable developments from 2025, and considers what they reveal about the current state and direction of Korean competition law.

It should be noted that this article does not attempt to provide a comprehensive year-in-review of all developments in 2025. Rather, it offers a selective analysis of those developments that, in my view, are particularly notable from a legal or institutional perspective. Some important developments are left aside, including, for example, the platform regulation initiatives (for those interested, see my recent presentation slides), the introduction of attorney-client privilege, and the KFTC's growing use of AI to improve complaint handling, case processing, and related enforcement administration. In principle, this article deals primarily with developments from 2025. Although a small number of early-2026 developments are mentioned, those references are limited to instances in which they crystallised or clarified developments that had already taken shape in 2025.

 

Assertive Enforcement by the KFTC

Before diving into the main discussion, it is useful to briefly review the recent enforcement record of the KFTC to understand the overall picture.

As the enforcement record for the three-year period from 2022 to 2024 shows, the KFTC has remained highly active in enforcing the MRFTA. Table 1 below indicates that the KFTC has handled a substantial number of cartel and unilateral conduct cases, and that it has not hesitated to make criminal referrals. Notably, the figures reported in the table exclude measures less severe than corrective orders, such as recommendations, warnings, and voluntary corrective actions. They also do not capture enforcement under other sector-specific regulatory regimes, addressing abuse of superior bargaining position in particular sectors. If all such measures were also taken into account, the overall enforcement picture would naturally appear even more extensive.

The precise number of enforcement actions taken in 2025 will become clear only once the next statistical yearbook is published, expected around May 2026. Even so, there is little reason at present to expect a significant departure from previous trends. The overall level of enforcement is likely to remain broadly comparable to that observed in earlier years.

 

 

With this general picture in mind, I now turn to some noteworthy cases from 2025.

 

Information Exchange Returns

In recent months, particularly in cartel enforcement, the KFTC appears to have become markedly more aggressive, backed by support from the new President. That said, this article sets the emerging 2026 story aside, which is still unfolding, and focuses on developments in 2025 that are noteworthy from a legal perspective.

Among a number of notable cases—including the Three Mobile Carriers Cartel (KFTC Decision No 2025-135 of 18 June 2025)—the most significant development in horizontal restraints appears to be the Four Banks' LTV Cartel decision, in which the KFTC took a bold step forward in revitalising the ‘information exchange' prohibition (see the KFTC's press release, issued on 20 January 2026; its written decision has not yet been publicly released).

Put simply, this case concerns four major banks' long-standing exchange of competitively sensitive information, specifically loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, which set the ceiling for mortgage lending based on collateral. The four banks were found to hold approximately 50–60% combined market shares in the household and corporate real-estate secured lending markets in Korea. The KFTC classified the conduct as a cartel through information exchange and announced in January 2026 that it had decided to impose corrective orders and total fines of KRW 272 billion.

What makes this case particularly important is not so much the factual setting itself, but rather its institutional and doctrinal significance within Korean competition law. 

As I discussed last year (Lee 2025, pp 8–11), cartel enforcement against information exchange in Korea has been significantly constrained by the Supreme Court's Ramyun Cartel decision in 2015 (Supreme Court Decision 2013Du25924 Decided 24 December 2015). In this case, the Court required the KFTC to establish the existence of an “agreement†beyond the mere act of information exchange itself in order to qualify the problematic conduct as a cartel under the MRFTA. While the Court's reasoning was not entirely irrational (given that the MRFTA explicitly uses the term “agreementâ€), the decision nonetheless has made the law's enforcement against concerted practices through information exchange effectively impracticable. After much controversy, the legislature sought to address this enforcement gap by explicitly categorising information exchange as a cartel infringement through the 2020 revision of the Act (Article 40(1)(9); Act No 17799, adopted on 29 December 2020 and effective as of 30 December 2021). Yet, despite this legislative intervention, it has remained uncertain in practice whether the new provision would effectively overcome the courts' strict evidentiary standards and restore cartel control under the MRFTA.

The Four Banks' LTV Cartel decision has come out against this backdrop, representing the first information exchange case under the 2020-revised framework. As the undertakings now deny the anti-competitiveness of their conduct and have already indicated their intention to appeal, this case is likely to become a landmark case, testing the practical effectiveness of the newly introduced information-exchange provision through judicial review.

By way of a personal observation, even assuming that the exchange of LTV information resulted in similar, coordinated collateral ratios being maintained across the four banks, as argued by the KFTC, the extent to which this conduct actually harmed consumers or corporate borrowers appears somewhat contestable. While the KFTC emphasises a reduction in consumer choice (KFTC's press conference transcript), the link between information exchange and competitive harm does not appear straightforward. 

Whether this decision will truly pave the way forward for robust enforcement against coordinated practices will depend on how assertively the courts recognise the anti-competitive nature of information exchanges.

 

Effective Commitments in Abuse Cases

Google YouTube Music Tying Case

Meanwhile, regarding abuse of dominance, the Google YouTube Music Tying case merits attention (KFTC Decision No 2025-222 of 9 December 2025; the written decision was publicly accessible in January and February 2026 but, for unknown reasons, is no longer available as of March 2026, so the discussion below relies on the version then available and some numerical details may require later verification). Although the case was resolved through commitments (referred to in Korea as a ‘consent decree/decision' under Articles 89-92 of the MRFTA) without the imposition of formal sanctions, it is nevertheless noteworthy. The decision demonstrates both the practical effectiveness of Korean competition law and the KFTC's capacity to secure substantial remedial commitments from a global platform firm.

Prior to this decision, Google did not offer a Premium Lite option in Korea (no ads; video only; hereinafter ‘Lite'). Instead, it provided only two paid subscription services: YouTube Premium (no ads; video and music; hereinafter ‘Premium') and YouTube Music Premium (no ads; music only; hereinafter ‘Music'). The KFTC viewed this structure, at least since June 2018, as constituting abusive tying, whereby Google tied its subscription-based music streaming service (“online music serviceâ€) to its subscription-based video streaming service (“user-generated content (UGC)-based online video serviceâ€), over which it held an entrenched dominant position (Decision, paras 48, 88).

The precise economic and legal context in which this bundling business model emerged (in Korea in particular) deserves further study. That said, it seems clear that these post-bundling market outcomes would have been difficult for the KFTC to ignore. Indeed, between June 2018 and August 2025, YouTube Music's market share (by MAU) increased dramatically, from 6.02% to 38.48%, while Melon, the long-standing market leader, saw its share fall sharply from 59.54% to 23.41% (Decision, para 90 and Figure 28). 

Whether these developments should be attributed to the ‘abusive' tying, or to the advantages of Google's music service and user preferences for integrated video-and-music consumption remains open to debate. For example, Saehe Shin and Seongcheol Kim find that YouTube Music holds a competitive advantage over domestic services in Korea, in terms of overall service quality, as it outperforms them in most gratification factors (Shin and Kim 2025).

Yet this difficult question did not trouble the KFTC on this occasion. The agency decided to resolve the case through commitments, which allowed it to bring the matter to a close without engaging in protracted disputes over counterfactuals or causality, while still securing an effective remedy package.

Specifically, the remedies went well beyond simple unbundling—that is, beyond merely requiring the launch of a Lite option (no ads; video only) (Decision, para 158). 

First, unlike in other jurisdictions, in Korea, Google committed to offering background play and offline downloads even under the Lite version (Decision, para 164). Second, Google agreed to maintain Lite's price (KRW 8,500 on Android/Web and KRW 10,900 on iOS—among the lowest globally when measured by the Lite-to-Premium price ratio) for at least one year from launch (para 170), and further committed that, for four years, the Lite-to-Premium price ratio in Korea would not exceed that in major overseas jurisdictions, while offering the same functionality (para 171). Third, Google agreed to freeze the price of the full Premium plan (no ads; video and music) for one year from the launch of the Lite version (para 178). Finally, Google committed to contribute KRW 30 billion to a fund to support Korea's music industry, which will be operated independently for four years through EBS, a public educational broadcaster in Korea (para 185). The KRW 30 billion figure was calibrated to roughly match the level of administrative fines that might have been imposed, based on revenues attributable to the tied product, namely subscription-based YouTube Music (para 145; see also Article 89(3)(1) of the MRFTA, which requires commitments to be balanced against the anticipated degree of corrective orders and sanctions).

Although some questions remain (most notably, why the fund should be channelled through EBS and used for the music industry), the overall remedy package represents, from a competition and consumer welfare perspective, a commendable achievement by the KFTC. To be sure, the timing of the commitment process—initiated in May 2025 (Decision, para 4) and announced as having been accepted in November 2025 (see the KFTC's press release, dated 27 November 2025)—has prompted suspicions that the KFTC may have been acting with an eye on US reactions. This timing coincided with trade negotiations in which Korea’s platform regulatory initiatives had been labelled ‘digital trade barriers' by the USTR (2025 National Trade Estimate Report, pp 252–253).

Even if that were so, however, the outcome can hardly be described as a weaker outcome than a formal infringement decision. On the contrary, in terms of speed and effectiveness, the commitment decision delivered a superior result. A similar point has been made by Hwang Lee (Korea University), who observed, “Because the case involved a US Big Tech firm, a formal infringement decision, if challenged, would likely have resulted in protracted litigation and risked entrenching anti-competitive market conditions. Against the backdrop of potential trade frictions with the US, the commitment route therefore appeared to offer a more effective and pragmatic solution.â€

 

Broadcom Set-Top Box Exclusive Dealing Case

Alongside the Google YouTube Music Tying case, the Broadcom Set-Top Box Exclusive Dealing case is also worth noting from a comparative perspective (KFTC Decision No 2025-175 of 1 September 2025).

Following the European Commission's 2020 commitment decision (AT.40608) and the US FTC's 2021 consent order (FTC Matter No 181-0205), the KFTC also closed its investigation into Broadcom's exclusive dealing practices for set-top box chips with commitments. Broadcom committed to cease and not repeat exclusionary practices (specifically, requiring Korean set-top box manufacturers to purchase Broadcom chips exclusively, or requiring them to purchase more than 50% of their demand) and not to threaten the withdrawal of benefits or supply if manufacturers refuse such requirements or deal with competitors. In addition to implementing a compliance programme and submitting annual compliance reports to the KFTC until 2031, Broadcom also agreed to contribute KRW 13 billion to a fund managed by the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association. This fund is intended to support small and medium-sized Korean semiconductor companies through talent training, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software support, and business promotion.

A notable distinction of the KFTC's remedy, compared to the EU and the US, is the creation of the fund to support the domestic industry. As in the previous Google YouTube Music Tying case, the fund amount, while not explained in detail, appears calibrated to meet MRFTA Article 89(3)(1)'s proportionality requirement vis-à-vis the anticipated sanctions (Decision, para 45).

 

Continued Reliance on UTPs

As seen above, Korean competition law already demonstrates considerable strength, even in the context of commitments, for example, by requiring changes to business models, exerting influence over pricing structures, or extracting benefits through the use of regulatory leverage. Yet, from a substantive law perspective, the area in which the KFTC's broad enforcement discretion becomes most visible is not the commitment framework, but the unfair trading practices (UTPs) regime.

As I have repeatedly emphasised (e.g., Lee 2025, pp 20–21), Korean competition law, unlike Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), contains a distinct category of UTPs (Article 45, MRFTA) that allows the KFTC to intervene beyond the traditional boundaries of antitrust enforcement. While this provision partly serves to cover vertical restraints, it also enables the competition authority to intervene in situations involving non-dominance-based abuses, without requiring a rigorous demonstration of competitive harm. The rationales for such intervention are diverse, including the prevention of incipient violations, the protection of consumer choice, and the prevention of unfair competition. Comparable legislative models exist in Japan (Articles 2(9) and 19 of the Anti-Monopoly Act) and Taiwan (Articles 21–25 of the Fair Trade Act).

Of course, it has long been a subject of debate in academia whether it is desirable to house such a wide range of prohibitions within competition law itself, or instead to carve them out and address UTP-related issues through other frameworks, such as unfair competition law, consumer protection law, private dispute mechanisms, or sector-specific regulations. Nevertheless, regardless of these academic debates, the provision has long enjoyed strong support among politicians, policymakers, and enforcers in Korea and continues to be actively invoked. In 2025 as well, the KFTC did not hesitate to exercise this formidable enforcement power, notwithstanding concerns and criticisms that the excessive reliance on the UTP framework may lead to arbitrary over-enforcement in cases lacking anti-competitive effects.

 

UTP: Abusive Refusal (Without Dominance)

For illustration, first, consider Shinbo and EO System, two input foreclosure cases (Shinbo: Decision No 2025-048 Decided 30 March 2025; EO System: Decision No 2025-197 Decided 16 October 2025).

There, Shinbo (the sole domestic supplier of a core component indispensable for manufacturing a military sighting device) and EO System (a downstream sighting-device manufacturer that had co-developed that component with Shinbo) were found to have implemented a vertical restraint by conditioning third-party supply of the component on EO System's prior consent, thereby effectively excluding a rival manufacturer from the procurement process. Given the parties' monopolistic market positions, the difficulty of substituting the core component, and the exclusionary nature of the arrangement, it is unsurprising that the KFTC intervened and sanctioned the conduct; indeed, had similar facts arisen in other jurisdictions, they would likely have been addressed in the same manner, for example, under Article 101 TFEU or Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

What is noteworthy is the analytical framing adopted by the KFTC. Rather than approaching the conduct as an abuse of dominance or as a vertical agreement, the authority characterised it as (i) Shinbo's unilateral refusal to supply and (ii) EO System's instigation of that refusal, relying on its UTPs toolkit (Article 45(1)(1), MRFTA). 

One might reasonably view this as a mere technical choice, especially given that, as mentioned above, the Korean provision on concerted practices, Article 40 of the MRFTA, applies (virtually always) to horizontal restraints. Indeed, in competition policy terms, the legal basis raises no particular concerns, as the anti-competitive conduct was effectively sanctioned through the KFTC's enforcement. 

From a legal, institutional standpoint, however, the decisions are more telling. Whether intended or not, Shinbo and EO System demonstrate the KFTC's ability to police exclusionary refusals under the UTPs framework (Article 45(1)(1), MRFTA) even without establishing dominance in a relevant market and without meeting the demanding evidentiary threshold for competitive harm typically required in the abuse of dominance analysis (Article 5, MRFTA). Whether this is desirable is beyond the scope of this article.

 

UTP: Exclusive Dealing (Without Market Power) 

The Logiall and Bike Bank's exclusive dealing case may also deserve attention. This case concerns exclusive dealing, without market power, in the on-demand food delivery logistics sector (KFTC Decision No 2025-075 of 23 April 2025). 

The key issue was that, at the risk of oversimplification, a delivery management software provider (Logiall) and a motorcycle leasing/supply company (Bike Bank) used exclusive contractual restrictions, imposing contractual disadvantages in the event of breach (e.g., termination and/or penalties). They were designed to discourage their customers, local delivery agencies, from switching to rival delivery management programs. The practice drew regulatory attention in the early 2020s, amid heightened political focus on food delivery platforms and related debates over platform regulation (see a media report in 2023).

That said, the parties' market positions were not significant (roughly 20% for Logiall and 30% for Bike Bank) (see Decision, paras 23 and 28), and the restriction's practical bite for customers appeared limited. The KFTC's decision itself notes that the customers switching programs could receive financial support from rival program providers, which could offset the penalties imposed (Decision, footnote 33).

Despite the absence of evidence of foreclosure, however, the KFTC sanctioned the conduct as “unfair†exclusive dealing on the ground that it restricted counterparties' freedom of choice, and issued a corrective order, pursuant to Article 45(1)(7), MRFTA. No fine was imposed, given the limited indications of foreclosure or any competitive (not contractual) harm (Decision, footnote 33). Even so, the intervention itself was notable.

From a comparative perspective, bearing in mind that market shares below 30% would typically fall within a safe harbour rather than trigger sanctions in other jurisdictions (e.g., Article 3(1), Regulation 2022/720), the legitimacy and economic justifications of the KFTC's intervention are open to serious question. Nonetheless, setting those issues aside (long criticised in the literature yet largely unchanged), the case illustrates the breadth of the KFTC's enforcement discretion under the UTP framework, allowing intervention on broader policy grounds even where a showing of foreclosure effects is difficult to establish.

 

UTP: Unfair Customer Inducement (Without Competitive Harm)

The breadth of the KFTC's enforcement discretion under the UTPs framework does not merely extend to relatively modest anti-competitive conduct; it also reaches into areas commonly associated with unfair competition or consumer protection. One of the most illustrative examples is the prohibition of unfair customer inducements under Article 45(1)(4) of the MRFTA.

Interestingly enough, the MRFTA allows the KFTC (and prosecutors, in parallel) to prohibit customer inducement practices, such as ‘excessive' discounts or promotional activities as unfair within the public competition enforcement framework, even where they do not qualify as predatory pricing under the framework of abuse of dominance. Article 45(1)(4) of the Act prohibits conduct that “[unjustly induces] a competitor's customer to transact with the business entity itself†(following the KLRI translation). Also, the Enforcement Decree specifies the conduct as follows: (i) ‘offering or proposing to offer unjust or excessive benefits, contrary to normal business practices, in order to induce a competitor's customers to transact with oneself'; (ii) misleading, deceptive practices; or (iii) other unjust inducements (see the Enforcement Decree, Annex 2, item (4)(a), (b), and (c)).

Leaving aside the other categories, the first practice under item (4)(a) has long attracted criticism because it allows the enforcer(s) to sanction promotional practices, the very essence of competitive rivalry, on the ground that they constitute an ‘unfair' method of competition. Indeed, regardless of the legislature's intent, the provision has the practical effect of placing certain competitive practices, such as aggressive discounts or promotional incentives that fall short of predatory pricing, under a potential cloud of illegality. Many commentators have argued that this, in turn, creates a risk that enforcers may selectively intervene, effectively bypassing the stricter requirements of the abuse of dominance framework and enforcing competition law in ways that protect competitors at the expense of consumer benefits.

Despite longstanding criticism, however, the rule has been retained in the MRFTA, Korean competition law, on the ground that there remains a practical need to sanction so-called ‘excessively aggressive' competitive methods, even where they do not amount to an abuse of dominance. In particular, such justifications have historically been invoked in sectors where broader public interests are thought to be at stake—for example, the distribution of free newspapers and promotional gifts in the newspaper industry, where concerns about media pluralism arise (see Constitutional Court of Korea, 2001Hun-ma605, 18 July 2002), or pharmaceutical rebate practices, where the consequences of agency problems between doctors and patients can be severe and problematic.

However, enforcement practice suggests that the KFTC has applied this provision well beyond such exceptional circumstances. The following illustrative (and non-exhaustive) cases from 2025 demonstrate the breadth of its application:

(i) ResMed Healthcare case (KFTC Decision No 2025-039 of 12 March 2025): ResMed Healthcare, a sleep apnoea device importer and rental company, offered referral commissions (20% of rental fees) to “broker†entities established by hospital staff or their relatives, in exchange for referring patients for their device rentals; this act was sanctioned as unfair inducement, resulting in a corrective order without fines.

(ii) Uway Apply and Jinhak Apply cases (KFTC Decision No 2025-052 of 21 March 2025; KFTC Decision No 2025-079 of 25 April 2025): Two duopolistic internet application agencies offered universities economic benefits, such as school development funds, workshop support, donations, and goods like iPads and laptops, worth approximately KRW 4.9 billion (Uway) and KRW 4.7 billion (Jinhak); these acts were sanctioned as unfair inducements, resulting in corrective orders for both companies without fines (due to the lack of direct consumer harm and in consideration of the practices' customary nature).

(iii) Kumbokju case (KFTC Decision No 2025-069 of 27 May 2025): Kumbokju, a regional distilled liquor (Soju) manufacturer, provided travel expenses for overseas trips and golf tours to private gatherings of liquor wholesalers (totalling KRW 351 million) (notably, the Liquor License Act prohibits providing economic benefits related to liquor transactions) to increase sales of their products (Charm Soju); this act was sanctioned as unfair inducement, resulting in a corrective order without fines.

(iv) The Korea Economic Daily case (KFTC Decision No 2025-081 of 15 July 2025): The Korea Economic Daily, a newspaper publisher, offered excessive economic benefits (exceeding 20% of the paid newspaper subscription price, a limit set by the Newspaper Notice) by bundling subscriptions with other publications or e-books at heavily discounted rates; this act was sanctioned as unfair inducement, resulting in a corrective order without fines.

(v) F&D Net case (KFTC Decision No 2025-121 of 28 October 2025): F&D Net, a health functional food manufacturer, provided cash and goods for meals, snacks, and event support, amounting to KRW 612 million in total, to hospitals and clinics to induce medical staff to recommend their health supplements to patients or guide them to the company’s “Inner Shopâ€; this act was sanctioned with a corrective order and a fine of KRW 196 million.

These cases demonstrate that the KFTC's statutory net under the MRFTA is far broader than other competition rules. 

 

UTP: Abuse of Superior Bargaining Position (Exploitation)

Arguably, one of the most effective and notable tools in the KFTC's arsenal is the prohibition of abuse of superior bargaining position (ASBP) under Article 45(1)(6), MRFTA—often discussed comparatively as ‘abuse of economic dependence' or ‘abuse of relative market power' in other jurisdictions (see, e.g., Lee 2026).

This prohibition has effectively complemented—and, in many cases, functionally replaced—the rule against exploitative abuse of dominance, being applied to situations where horizontal substantial market power (dominance) is difficult to establish but coercive exploitation of asymmetric bargaining situations is prevalent and clearly problematic. Traditionally, in Korea (and similarly in Japan), the prohibition has been frequently applied in retail and manufacturing contexts, against the backdrop of dual economic structures (polarised between a small number of large firms and a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises). More recently, however, it has also been applied to the conduct of digital platforms, which frequently present issues of exploitation against platform users and where establishing a specific competitive relationship (i.e., market definition) is often difficult.

This trend continued to be observed in 2025. Take the Yeogiotte and Yanolja cases, for example (KFTC Decision No 2025-160 of 7 August 2025 (Yeogiotte); KFTC Decision No 2025-161 of 8 August 2025 (Yanolja)). 

The KFTC sanctioned two major online accommodation booking platforms, Yeogiotte and Yanolja, for abusing their superior bargaining position over small lodging operators (motels, etc.). The KFTC imposed fines of KRW 1 billion (Yeogiotte) and KRW 540 million (Yanolja), respectively, along with corrective orders. 

In these cases, the platforms were accused of unilaterally expiring unused discount coupons without refunding their value to the operators. According to the KFTC, the funds for these coupons had effectively been pre-paid by the operators to the platforms, embedded within advertising fees, and should have been refunded to the operators if unused by consumers.

Setting aside contractual specifics, the significance of this enforcement is that ‘dominance' or ‘substantial market power' (required under Article 5 of the MRFTA) did not need to be established. 

In Korea, these two platforms are the obvious go-to choices for consumers booking motels, etc. Indeed, the KFTC's decisions specify that approximately 80% to 95% of operators use these two platforms (Yeogiotte, para 131; Yanolja, para 120), and their reliance on these kinds of apps for revenue is exceptionally high, ranging from 64% to 68% in 2018–2020 (Yeogiotte, para 136; Yanolja, para 121). On the consumer side, the platforms also hold commanding positions, with Yeogiotte and Yanolja accounting for 28.8% (Yeogiotte) and 32.7% (Yanolja) of the end-user share, respectively (Yanolja, para 122). That said, establishing such dominance could have been bogged down in complex counterarguments regarding horizontal competition and market definition. Fortunately, the KFTC was able to circumvent that protracted discussion by utilising the ASBP prohibition—a more appropriate tool to apply in such situations. 

Admittedly, these cases demonstrate that the ASBP rule has evolved into a highly effective tool for the KFTC to sanction exploitative conduct by powerful platforms that hold relative power over business users.

Of course, it may not be immediately obvious whether the KFTC's finding of abuse in Yeogiotte and Yanolja was economically and legally sound. This article sets aside debates regarding whether the KFTC's broad authority is desirable from the perspectives of market dynamics, institutional efficiency, and competition policy. It describes the fact that the KFTC holds broad discretion to intervene under the current UTP framework (even without further regulatory measures targeting platforms).

 

Developments in Merger Control 

In addition to agreement and abuse cases, the KFTC's merger control in 2025 also displayed some notable developments.

 

Synopsys/Ansys: The Remedy Submission System in Action

Firstly, the newly introduced remedy submission system is now beginning to take shape in practice.

In the past, the KFTC, unlike its counterparts in the EU, the UK, the US, and Japan, did not have a formal institutional channel through which it could discuss remedies with merging parties or conduct market tests prior to reaching a decision. Under the previous regime, case handlers typically designed remedies (following informal consultations with the merging parties), after which the proposed remedies were reviewed and ultimately confirmed or rejected by the Commission of the KFTC. This relatively rigid institutional framework attracted criticism on several grounds. In particular, concerns were raised regarding the potential mismatch between the remedies designed by the authority and actual market conditions, the difficulty of ensuring consistency with remedies imposed by foreign competition authorities in global merger cases, and the limited transparency and legal certainty associated with informal consultations (see the KFTC's Summary, dated 26 September 2024).

Against this backdrop, Articles 13-2 and 14(2) of the MRFTA were introduced in 2024, establishing the remedy submission system. Under this framework, merging parties may propose remedies aimed at addressing the KFTC's competition concerns, while the KFTC may conduct a market test before adopting its final decision. The system was first applied in the Synopsys/Ansys merger in March 2025, where structural remedies were adopted (KFTC Decision No 2025-056 of 27 March 2025).

As is well known, Synopsys and Ansys are chip design software providers, and, in recent years, their horizontal integration raised competition concerns in several jurisdictions worldwide. The transaction attracted scrutiny particularly in three markets, including the markets for register-transfer-level (RTL) power consumption analysis software and for optics and photonics design software (see, e.g., the European Commission's press release IP/25/181). In Korea as well, against the backdrop of increasing attention to competition issues in the AI semiconductor supply chain, the transaction likewise became the subject of careful review by the KFTC. Following a full-scale investigation, the KFTC cleared the transaction subject to structural remedies, requiring Ansys to divest its RTL power consumption analysis software business and Synopsys to divest its optics and photonics design software assets.

Subsequently, in the TVING/Wavve case in June 2025 (KFTC Decision No 2025-072 of 4 June 2025), which concerned an interlocking directorate between two local streaming platforms competing with Netflix, the KFTC accepted behavioural remedies under the system to address potential price increases in the domestic paid-streaming market. This represented another early application of the system and the first case in which it was used to implement behavioural remedies.

 

Gmarket/AliExpress JV: Korea's First Data Consolidation Case

Second, the Gmarket/AliExpress JV case is also worth noting. By the KFTC's own account, this appears to have been the first merger case in Korea in which the KFTC designed and imposed remedies specifically targeting competition concerns arising from data consolidation (see the KFTC's press release, dated 18 September 2025).

This was a case where Gmarket, one of Korea's domestic e-commerce platforms (albeit well behind the top two domestic platforms, namely Naver and Coupang), sought to form a joint venture (JV) with Alibaba Group's AliExpress. Although the latter's position in the broader domestic online retail market was limited, it held a leading position in the domestic online cross-border e-commerce market, with a 37.1% market share, while Gmarket ranked fourth with a 3.9% share. Focusing on that market, in which the combined entity would hold a 41% share, the KFTC analysed the competition concerns arising from the JV.

Notably, in its analysis, the Korean agency placed particularly strong emphasis on data. Treating data as a key competitive factor in this case, and referring to Alibaba Group's top-tier capabilities in cloud computing, AI, and data analytics, the KFTC considered that the JV could strengthen both the quantity and quality of the parties' data and, through feedback-loop mechanisms and network effects, further reinforce the JV's market power, raise rivals' costs and barriers to entry, and weaken incentives to maintain privacy and data-security standards. On that basis, among other things, the KFTC required the parties to keep domestic consumer data technically separate and to refrain from using each other's consumer data in the domestic cross-border e-commerce market for three years (subject to possible extension). As the KFTC's press release itself indicates, the case invites comparison with the EU's Google/Fitbit case (2020) and the US's Bazaarvoice/PowerReviews case (2014). 

Another noteworthy aspect of the case is not simply that the KFTC addressed data consolidation for the first time, but that the government agency framed the case in explicitly data-centric and technically sophisticated terms, against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical sensitivity.

In any event, as Hwang Lee noted in media comments, the key question going forward will be whether this data separation remedy can be effectively implemented, given the technical difficulties involved in monitoring the JV's internal data processing.

 

Korean Air/Asiana Airlines: The Costs of a Misguided Policy Choice

Third, the Asiana Airlines case (KFTC Decision No 2025-157 (penalty payment), No 2025-026 (criminal referral) of 28 July 2025) and the Korean Air/Asiana Airlines case (KFTC Decision No 2025-226 of 22 December 2025).

These were a pair of post-clearance enforcement actions in which the KFTC sanctioned Korean Air and Asiana Airlines for failing to comply with remedies imposed in the 2022 clearance decision. The remedies, originally imposed in May 2022 and later modified in December 2024, combined structural measures with behavioural obligations, including (i) caps on average airfares, under which average fares on the affected routes could not exceed the 2019 average fare adjusted for inflation, and (ii) a prohibition on reducing annual seat supply below 90% of the corresponding 2019 level on the affected routes. Both measures were intended to require the airlines to maintain prices and supply at approximately pre-pandemic levels. However, the KFTC's first compliance review for the first quarter of 2025 revealed that the carriers had raised fares beyond the permitted caps (Asiana Airlines) and reduced seat supply below the required level (Korean Air and Asiana Airlines). Their failure to comply with the remedies led to penalty payments of approximately KRW 12.1 billion for Asiana Airlines in the fare cap case, along with a criminal referral against the company, and of KRW 5.88 billion and KRW 588 million for Korean Air and Asiana Airlines respectively in the seat supply case.

As I have discussed elsewhere, this was a deeply problematic deal from the very outset. The two-to-one merger effectively monopolised Korea's domestic full-service airline sector. The textbook risks of monopoly, namely higher prices and reduced supply, were apparent from the very beginning. Yet the government, through a decision at a high-level council meeting, pursued the deal by urging Korean Air to acquire Asiana Airlines and pressuring the KFTC to clear it. This was a misguided policy choice, overly driven by the objective of recovering the public funds injected into Asiana Airlines, together with an industrial policy ambition to create a ‘national champion.' Under strong government pressure, the KFTC approved the deal with a package of structural and behavioural remedies. To be sure, despite those measures, the underlying problem remained: this was a merger that should have been blocked. There were serious doubts as to whether the remedies devised to justify the clearance could in fact be implemented effectively. The 2025 compliance cases confirmed that these early concerns were well founded.

The significance of these cases lies in the fact that the KFTC did not treat remedy design as the end of the matter; it continued to monitor implementation, and responded with effective sanctions, including a corporate criminal referral, when compliance failed. Domestically, this sends an important signal to businesses that remedies must be complied with. 

More broadly, however, the fundamental question remains: were these administrative costs necessary in the first place? The KFTC's follow-on actions are avoidable costs of failing to block a merger that should never have been approved. In this sense, more broadly, the Korean Air/Asiana Airlines saga may serve as a useful reminder of the risks of misguided policy decisions, particularly at a time when industrial policy arguments for recalibrating merger control and tolerating more anti-competitive consolidation have re-emerged in the name of innovation defences.

 

Beyond Sanctions: Competition Advocacy

Thus far, I have focused on the KFTC's sanction-based enforcement against anti-competitive conduct by businesses. Yet the role of a competition authority does not, and should not, end there. Competitive harm may arise not only from private restraints, but also from regulations, administrative practices, and other public or institutional arrangements that unnecessarily restrict competition. In some cases, the harm caused by misguided regulation may be more serious and more durable than that caused by private firms. Competition authorities therefore also have an important role in promoting a pro-competitive institutional environment and broader awareness of the benefits of competition, beyond enforcement. This non-enforcement function is commonly described as competition advocacy.

 

The MDDIA as an Illustration of Regulatory Harm

A useful illustration is Korea's Mobile Device Distribution Improvement Act (MDDIA), repealed in 2025 (with effect from 22 July), after operating nearly 11 years.

The MDDIA shows both the seriousness of harm from anti-competitive regulation itself and the importance of competition advocacy. To summarise, at the risk of oversimplification, the MDDIA restricted price discrimination among mobile users regarding mobile device purchase subsidies, in the market context where mobile devices were typically sold through carriers in exchange for multi-year service contracts. Initially, proponents framed the MDDIA as a measure intended to improve transparency in the mobile device distribution structure. Yet, in practice, it failed to achieve that goal and instead effectively prohibited firms from using so-called “discriminatory†subsidies (essentially price discounts) as a competitive tool, thereby increasing Korean consumers' mobile-device purchase costs for nearly a decade. The consumer harm generated under that anti-competitive regulatory regime over nearly a decade is irreversible. (For a more nuanced analysis of the MDDIA's multifaceted effects across stakeholders, see Kwon 2018).

The eventual repeal of the MDDIA in 2025 serves as a useful reminder that competition policy should not remain confined to enforcement alone, but should also extend proactively to preventing and correcting anti-competitive institutional arrangements.

 

The KFTC's Competition Advocacy in 2025 

The KFTC (MDDIA notwithstanding) has generally made meaningful efforts in competition advocacy and maintained a relatively active stance throughout 2025.

For example, on 8 December 2025, the KFTC announced a package of proposals addressing 22 anti-competitive regulations. According to the press release, the package included (i) expanding the issuance of new general liquor wholesale licences and increasing the allowable volume of direct purchases between soju manufacturers and ethanol producers, which has been limited by regulation, (ii) relaxing restrictions on the rental of privately owned camper vans through car-sharing platforms, (iii) pursuing an AI-specific framework that would permit the use of original data for AI training, subject to strengthened safeguards and deliberation and resolution by the Personal Information Protection Commission (Korea's data protection authority), (iv) extending smart-technology-based incentives in public wastewater management, (v) easing on-package food-labelling requirements through expanded QR-code labelling, (vi) easing bakery origin-labelling requirements, and (vii) clarifying subcontracting eligibility in new-technology public works.

Another example came later that month. On 24 December 2025, it was reported that the KFTC officially stated, in an opinion submitted to a member of the National Assembly, that it opposed a proposed amendment to the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act aimed at preventing telemedicine intermediary platforms from entering the pharmaceutical wholesale business. Reportedly, the KFTC warned that a complete ban on granting wholesale licences to telemedicine intermediaries, pursued by pharmacists' groups and the Ministry of Health and Welfare, could restrict competition in service variety, chill innovation, and harm consumer welfare. That position aligned with the innovation-friendly position taken by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. (As of early March 2026, the bill remained pending and continued to be pushed by the ruling party in substantially the same form.)

 

The KFTC's Data and Competition Report

It is also worth noting that, on 30 December 2025, the KFTC released its policy report Data and Competition. As the KFTC itself explains, the report is positioned as a follow-up to last year's Generative AI and Competition report. Below are several points from the report that stood out to me.

First, data exploitation. The KFTC appears increasingly prepared to pursue data exploitation cases, such as Facebook. While the data exploitation concern already surfaced in the previous report on AI, this time the agency seems to go a step further—signalling an intention to develop abuse assessment standards that would underpin the legal and economic justification of possible future intervention.

Second, privacy as a defence. The report stresses that privacy considerations cannot always justify restricting competitors' data collection. This point clearly targets Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Given enforcement developments in other jurisdictions such as France, the issue seems much on the KFTC's radar.

Third, sensitivity to relations with the privacy regulator. Interestingly, the tone of the report reads very cautious, which contrasts with the KFTC's traditionally assertive enforcement posture. My sense is that the agency is now very mindful of institutional coordination, particularly with the data privacy authority, the Personal Information Protection Commission. Even the report itself appears to extend a cooperative gesture to it. In my view, this sensitivity may be shaped by its past turf conflicts with the Korea Communications Commission (now Korea Media and Communications Commission) over platform regulation—a quite traumatic memory for the KFTC.

Finally, interoperability. It is notable that the report highlights interoperability—particularly in app markets and general search—and even refers to reviewing the need for a pre-emptive (ex ante) framework. That language suggests that ex ante platform tools are still very much within the range of options being contemplated.

It seems that reports of this kind can play a valuable advocacy role by improving policymakers' understanding of evolving market dynamics and informing more competition-conscious regulatory design.

 

Parallel Enforcement by the KPS

As I have discussed elsewhere (see Lee 2024), the KFTC is not the sole public enforcer of the MRFTA. Interestingly, its already strong enforcement is further reinforced by the parallel involvement of a criminal investigative and prosecutorial authority, the KPS.

Put briefly, since the 2010s, Korea has seen strong pushes by some proponents—including prosecutors, criminal law scholars, and certain civic groups—to criminalise MRFTA violations more aggressively. They have argued that the regime under which the KFTC holds exclusive criminal referral authority over MRFTA violations should be repealed or at least modified to grant referral power to other institutions, and they have achieved some legislative success. Currently, the MRFTA allows several institutions, including the head of the KPS, to request that the KFTC make a criminal referral; once such a request is made, the KFTC is mandated to comply and has no discretion to refuse, under Article 129(5) of the MRFTA (for more details, see Lee 2024; for a quick overview, with visuals, see Lee 2024 or Lee 2023).

Among antitrust scholars and experts, however, such policy and legislative moves have generated substantial controversy, raising serious concerns about over-criminalisation and over-enforcement of the MRFTA. This is partly because Korean law, originally modelled after Japan's AMA—which itself relied only on criminal sanctions before the 1977 introduction of administrative surcharges (fines) (Marquis and Seryo 2014)—historically attached criminal sanctions to a wide range of violations, including abuse of dominance and UTPs, though some exceptions have recently been introduced since December 2020. Critics have also pointed to the additional administrative costs of overlapping enforcement, as well as the increased compliance burdens and uncertainty that such duplication can produce. (For readers' reference, the double-jeopardy concern has largely receded after the Korean Constitutional Court's 2003 decision holding that the coexistence of administrative surcharges (fines) and criminal penalties is not unconstitutional. See Constitutional Court of Korea, 2001Hun-Ka25, 24 July 2003.)

Those institutional risks have not disappeared. Even so, recent practice suggests that the KPS has mitigated some of these concerns, to a certain extent, by concentrating its coercive power in a narrower set of areas where it can plausibly be seen as more necessary, notably cartels. The criminalisation of cartels remains contestable, of course. But from the perspective of those who view the KFTC's enforcement as insufficiently effective, the KPS's criminal enforcement in 2025 displayed a form of constructive redundancy.

 

Sugar and Flour Cartels: Enforcement Competition

Take the recent sugar and flour cartel cases. These cases were factually fairly straightforward. The former, the Sugar Cartel case, involved three sugar producers colluding on prices for roughly four years, from February 2021 to April 2025. That was hardly surprising, given that the Korean sugar market is highly oligopolistic, with those three firms accounting for about 89% of the market, and that this was not their first violation (for details, see the KFTC's press release). On the public record, the case does not appear to have raised any particularly difficult legal issues. The flour cartel case was also not substantially different.

Beyond the legal issues, the key question from a policy, institutional, and organisational perspective was that, where the wrongdoers were relatively easy to identify, which agency—the KFTC or the KPS—could move against them more quickly and more effectively.

It was the KPS that first captured the media spotlight. According to its press release, the KPS searched the sugar producers in September 2025 and secured indictments in November 2025, after requesting a criminal referral from the KFTC and obtaining it (a process that is now largely formal in practice, given that the KFTC is legally required to comply with such a request). By 26 November 2025, it had indicted two corporations and eleven individuals, including two detained executives. Unsurprisingly, this enforcement action drew considerable public attention because, according to its announcement, the KPS appeared to have moved much faster and more assertively than the KFTC.

From the KFTC's perspective, however, that comparison may seem somewhat unfair. The KFTC had opened its own investigation much earlier, in March 2024, and, as Chair Ju later explained, the agency had completed its investigation and referred the case for Commission deliberation on 30 October 2025 (see Chair Ju's press briefing transcript). But the KFTC generally does not publicise that stage. As the Chair himself noted, the agency usually issues a press release only once the Commission of the KFTC has reached its final decision. And in the administrative track, the legally operative disposition is not the dispatch of the examiner's report (roughly akin to a Statement of Objections), but the Commission's final resolution. That differs from the criminal track, where the KPS's operative enforcement step is the indictment, while guilt and sentence are determined later by the courts. The KFTC may have looked slower than it actually was. For reference, in the Sugar Cartel case, it was only on 12 February 2026 that the KFTC's sanctions, including total fines of KRW 408.3 billion, were publicly and officially announced.

My sense is that, perhaps stung by the impression of having fallen behind the KPS, the KFTC reacted differently in the following Flour Cartel case. This time, following the indictment announcement of the KPS on 2 February 2026, the KFTC also publicly announced on 20 February 2026 that it had sent the examiner's report to seven flour manufacturers and sellers on the previous day and disclosed the main allegations. The KFTC's Investigation Division, in the press briefing, stated that it would communicate more actively with the public, including by announcing investigation outcomes and the main allegations in major cases even before the Commission reaches its final decision.

To be sure, given that the KFTC is an integrated model combining investigative and adjudicative functions (see Trebilcock and Iacobucci 2010; UNCTAD 2019), some have voiced concern about the propriety of publicly announcing the agency's own findings, in the name of the KFTC, even ahead of the Commission's final decision being made. 

Nevertheless, leaving that debate aside—and, again, also setting aside the separate debate over the desirability of criminalising cartel conduct—Korea currently seems, from a purely institutional-design perspective, to be experiencing higher enforcement productivity than under the earlier regime, when the KFTC monopolised the initiation of public enforcement. From the taxpayers' perspective, inter-agency enforcement competition, and its outcome, can be seen as beneficial (see, e.g., Higgins et al. 2011). Niskanen's saying is arguably true: “competition in a bureaucracy is as important a condition for social efficiency as it is among profit-seeking firms.†(Niskanen 1971, p 111).

 

Coupang: The Continuing Risk of Over-Criminalisation

That said, it is still important to note the serious, remaining concern that the competence creep of the KPS may be occurring beyond cartels, into areas such as abuse and UTPs. A prominent example from 2025 is its indictment of Coupang on 1 May 2025 over the alleged manipulation of search rankings to favour Coupang's direct-purchase (first-party) products and private-brand products, that is, a form of self-preferencing. This followed the KFTC's criminal referral in 2024 (see Lee 2025, pp 23–25). In Coupang, the enforcers relied on one of the provisions on UTPs prohibiting deceptive customer inducement, Article 45(1)(4) MRFTA (see the KPS's press release).

Admittedly, unless accompanied by fraud or some other independently wrongful conduct, extending the shadow of criminal liability to unilateral commercial conduct of this kind carries an obvious risk of chilling competitive activity itself in the affected sector. At least until a legislative solution arrives—and, fortunately, the current policy direction appears to be to narrow the scope of criminal prohibitions while raising the maximum level of administrative fines—the courts' role in placing effective limits on excessive prosecutorial criminal enforcement by the KPS will remain important, as discussed below.

 

The Courts as Moderators of Over- and Under-Enforcement

As enforcement becomes more active and tougher, the courts' well-balanced role in screening out erroneous enforcement becomes more important. The following section examines how the Korean courts in 2025 performed that moderating function across several landmark rulings.

 

NAVER Shopping: Self-preferencing Is Not Unlawful Per Se

For example, take the NAVER Shopping judgement, arguably the most important ruling of the year in Korea's competition law (Supreme Court Decision 2023Du32709 Decided 16 October 2025). As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, put simply, it was a case in which the Supreme Court rightly corrected the enforcer's misguided, isomorphic attempt to transplant the self-preferencing theory from the EU's Google Shopping case into the different market context of Korea.

The Korean self-preferencing case traces back to 2020. In October 2020, the KFTC announced that it had decided to sanction self-preferencing by NAVER, a local search platform, as both an abuse of dominance and UTPs (specifically, discriminatory treatment as lessening competition and deceptive inducement). The formal decision was dated 27 January 2021 (KFTC Decision No 2021-027). From both its press conference transcript and the enforcer's decision itself (see paras 207, 456), it was evident that the KFTC's action was largely influenced by the European Commission's 2017 Google Shopping case. One notable difference was that, whereas Google Shopping centred on leveraging dominance in general search into comparison shopping, the Korean NAVER Shopping case centred on the alleged leveraging of dominance in comparison shopping into the e-commerce marketplace (the so-called “open-market serviceâ€). The KFTC found that NAVER had abused its dominance by favouring sellers using its own e-commerce service (“Smart Storeâ€) over rival sellers in the results of its comparison-shopping service—for example, by adjusting its search algorithm in ways that lowered rivals' rankings and increased the visibility of Smart Store listings.

To be sure, the fact that the KFTC drew inspiration from the European Commission's action was not, in itself, the problem. Generally speaking, there is nothing wrong with drawing insights from other jurisdictions, taking cues from foreign experience, or learning through comparison, of course. The same is true of self-preferencing. Search bias by a vertically integrated monopolistic search engine is a source of concern, and the EU's case was certainly worth studying.

The real problem was that, quite apart from whether that doctrine fit the European market conditions of the time, it might simply not have been a good fit for Korea's own market context. Among other things, while Google held a deeply entrenched—almost “superdominantâ€â€”position in the general search market in the EU, NAVER still faced competitive pressure in both Korea's general search market and the country's comparison-shopping market. Also, as several experts pointed out, the actual impact of the alleged abuse in the e-commerce marketplace was unclear, and the causal link between the conduct and the alleged effects in that market remained highly contestable (for further details, see Lee 2025, pp 3–5). In my view, NAVER Shopping was, at best, a misplaced application of the self-preferencing theory to the Korean market.

On 16 October 2025, that misplaced application was effectively corrected by the Supreme Court's decision. Reversing the lower court, which had sided with the KFTC, the Supreme Court held that the KFTC had failed to prove that NAVER's conduct amounted to a violation of Korean competition law. From a legal perspective, the Court presented several significant points, particularly regarding abuse of dominance. These may be summarised as follows. First, Korea's competition law does not impose on a dominant firm a general obligation of “equal treatment.†Second, concern about competitive harm cannot be inferred solely from the subjective intent to restrict competition. Third, where a platform's alleged self-preferencing is said to leverage its existing dominance into another market, the enforcer must still prove anti-competitive effects in that market, and must also examine the causal link between the conduct and the alleged effects. (For a more detailed analysis, see Lee 2025, pp 5–8.)

Unsurprisingly, the ruling immediately met resistance from enforcers and platform regulation advocates. For instance, at a seminar held after the decision, In-hye Ko, the KFTC director responsible for platform policy, reportedly delivered a rather direct criticism of the Court's ruling, accusing it of “moving backwards from years of policy discussions about platform market power†(MLex report). 

Even so, from a legal perspective, I believe that the more accurate implication of the ruling may be better captured in the following comment by Yong Lim (Seoul National University). He observed, “An important implication of this ruling is that an abstract, market-structure-based approach is insufficient for determining whether a platform operator has abused its dominant position, and that the issue must instead be assessed on the basis of evidence in each individual case.†He further noted that “This means that a dominant platform operator should not be condemned simply on the formal ground that it participates in multiple markets; nor is it right to conclude that the ruling is necessarily favourable to platform operators or that it will inevitably obstruct KFTC enforcement.†(The Law Times report). I find this a more legally balanced understanding of the Supreme Court's ruling than the view that the Court simply sided with digital firms.

Additionally, the Supreme Court also remanded the accompanying NAVER Video case in part, where NAVER had been accused of deceptive customer inducement under the UTP framework for favouring its own videos in video-search results by assigning them additional ranking weight, holding that the challenged practice had not been shown to be unlawful (see Supreme Court Decision 2023Du38219 Decided 6 November 2025; and BKL's English summary).

 

Delivery Hero (Yogiyo): Judicial Control of Over-Criminalisation

Another example of judicial control came from the criminal side. It was the Delivery Hero (Yogiyo) case, where the courts effectively suppressed the risk of over-criminalisation by maintaining a high evidential bar for proving criminal intent (mens rea) (Supreme Court Decision 2024Do11863 Decided 20 February 2025).

The factual setting of this case was not that complicated. It concerned Delivery Hero's food-delivery app platform Yogiyo and its price parity provision, or most-favoured-nation (MFN) clause (called “the lowest price guarantee programmeâ€), imposed on restaurants.

What made the case particularly interesting was the KFTC's legal framing. In 2020, the KFTC imposed a corrective order and a fine of KRW 468 million on the company (KFTC Decision No 2020-251 of 24 August 2020). However, interestingly, the KFTC framed it as ASBP, not abuse of dominance or vertical restraints of competition. It was a notable approach, as, under the Korean ASBP framework of Article 45 (then Article 23) of the MRFTA, the focus of wrongdoing inevitably shifted more toward the parity obligation's coercive and exploitative nature than its anti-competitive effects.

Of course, such a choice of legal basis was not incomprehensible. In this case, the KFTC could not invoke the dominance provision due to Delivery Hero's limited market position. At the time, the company held roughly 26–27% market share by volume of sales, falling far behind the leading company (Woowa Brothers, which operated the app Baemin), which then held roughly 55–65% market share (according to the KFTC's press release). Nor was it practically possible to rely on the collusion framework of Article 40 (then Article 19), as the provision has long been interpreted mostly as a rule for horizontal agreements, rather than vertical agreements. It appears that, against this background, the KFTC turned to the ASBP prohibition. 

(For comparison, in Japan, the issue of MFNs was framed under the general clause on ‘restrictive terms'—a UTP provision Korea does not have (see Lee 2025, slide no 17)—and could therefore be addressed in a manner closer to vertical restraints, with greater attention to anti-competitive effects. See Hayakawa and Arai 2023, pp 102-103).

However, the ASBP frame and its emphasis on the conduct's coercive nature later led the case in an unintended direction—namely, into criminal proceedings. Although the KFTC did not make a referral to the KPS, the criminal track was nevertheless triggered by another institution. On 26 November 2020, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups requested the KFTC to make a criminal referral against the company, focusing on harm to small businesses, and through the mandatory referral-request mechanism, the matter then proceeded into criminal prosecution. Understandably, that development raised serious concerns. The concern was not merely the chilling effect on platform businesses. More fundamentally, it risked becoming a catalyst for the over-criminalisation of the MRFTA, especially with respect to ASBP.

Fortunately, the courts maintained a balanced approach from the first instance to the final appeal. According to the Supreme Court's press release (which contains further details), the courts found it difficult to conclude that the defendants had the requisite criminal intent. In particular, the second-instance court relied on the following considerations, all of which were upheld by the Supreme Court:

Put roughly, first, the price parity provision may not necessarily have been harmful to consumers (in terms of, for example, information accuracy, convenience, or discount benefits); second, it may even have been advantageous for small restaurants, as the commission-based pricing plan (as opposed to a monthly flat-fee plan) that the parity programme helped sustain was beneficial for them; third, even if the increased costs generated by the parity clause were passed on to consumers, that alone did not immediately make the clause unlawful; fourth, given the benefits restaurants enjoyed through the app, the price parity obligation was not necessarily unfairly disadvantageous to them; and fifth, although the conduct was framed as managerial interference (a form of ASBP under the MRFTA), it did not rise to the degree of interference treated as unlawful under other relevant statutes. This was a rational and welcome correction. 

In fact, this was not the first case in which the Supreme Court had controlled over-criminalisation by insisting on a stricter showing of criminal intent in the context of MRFTA violations. Most notably, in KNN Life (Supreme Court Decision 2017Du51365 Decided 12 July 2018), the Court already made clear that, in criminal UTP cases, “unfairness†forms part of the content of the criminal intent and must therefore be assessed cautiously, for the sake of predictability. By contrast, in the administrative context, sanctions may in principle be imposed without proving such intent, so long as there is no justification for the conduct, the Court ruled.

After KNN Life, the 2020 full amendment removed several UTP categories (mostly lessening-competition-type UTPs) from the criminal track, but still many UTPs, including ASBP, remain criminally punishable under the MRFTA. In that institutional setting, the courts' balanced approach in cases such as Delivery Hero (Yogiyo) is worth praising and should continue.

 

Korean Re: An Enforcer-Friendly Ruling

It would be too quick to conclude from the foregoing decisions that the Korean Supreme Court has moved only in the direction of restraining over-enforcement by enforcers. Not surprisingly, there have also been cases in which the Court took a distinctly enforcer-friendly approach. One of the leading examples is Korean Re (Supreme Court Decision 2020Du54074 Decided 5 June 2025).

Put very simply, the case concerned whether Korean Re, the dominant firm in the Korean general aviation reinsurance market, engaged in abusive exclusive dealing through a set of contractual arrangements with primary (ceding) insurers and related practices, which could foreclose the market and prevent potential rival reinsurers from entering. While the Seoul High Court found only some of the challenged conduct unlawful (annulling the corrective order in part and cancelling the fine imposed in full), the Supreme Court, siding with the KFTC in many respects, partially reversed and remanded the case to the lower court.

Here I focus only on two purely legal features that are evident from the judgement, leaving aside the industrial details and the factual and legal intricacies.

First, the Supreme Court reaffirmed—by reference to its earlier Qualcomm I decision (Supreme Court Decision 2013Du14726 Decided 31 January 2019)—that even a voluntarily accepted arrangement may constitute abusive exclusive dealing. While the lower court had denied the existence of exclusive dealing on the ground that the contractual arrangements at issue could not be regarded as having been coercively imposed—that is, in my understanding, that the arrangements could be regarded as reasonable in light of the broader economic and legal context—the Supreme Court held that this was mistaken, and found that the lower court's ruling, based on that wrong premise, erred in law. 

Although it appears that the case was about the voluntariness of the arrangements, in my understanding, the underlying issue was more about how a normative assessment should be applied to the underlying industry realities. In this respect, the Supreme Court, adopting a more normative perspective, seemed to place greater emphasis on the foreclosure and exclusionary structure created by the arrangements and the related practices, rather than on the contextual justifications relied upon by the lower court.

Secondly, the Court made clear that the challenged practices had to be viewed as a whole. In Korean Re, the Seoul High Court had broken the practices down into separate conduct and concluded that only some of them were abusive, while others were not. The Supreme Court disagreed. In its view, where the set of practices was undertaken pursuant to “a single intent to exclude competitors,†the lower court should have assessed them “in combination,†rather than one by one in isolation.

It is not entirely novel that the Court looks at challenged conduct holistically in abuse cases. Even so, the explicit ruling that conduct pursued under a single exclusionary intent should be assessed in combination seems quite notable, and in some respects slightly concerning. For instance, in Korea, courts have treated anti-competitive purpose (intent) as inferable from the form of the conduct itself in abusive exclusive dealing cases, thereby lowering the bar for finding such conduct unlawful (see, e.g., Supreme Court Decision 2007Du22078 Decided 9 July 2009). Read together with this case law, the holistic-assessment approach in Korean Re may be somewhat concerning, as it could extend the already broad scope of unlawful exclusive dealing even further. In particular, as Woochan Kang observed, where exclusive dealing restricts only potential entry, as in this Korean Re case, such a holistic approach may make it too easy to infer competitive harm on the basis of judicial intuition or inference (Kang 2025). Here, the point is not that the Supreme Court was plainly wrong and the Seoul High Court plainly right, but rather that, from my perspective, the judgement leaves some uncertainty as to the assessment of the anti-competitive effects of exclusive dealing.

That said, setting those concerns aside, it seems beyond doubt that the Court's holdings in this case will operate to the advantage of the KFTC in its future enforcement.

 

Evergreen: No Easy Sectoral Exemption

Lastly, Evergreen (Supreme Court Decision 2024Du35446 Decided 24 April 2025). In this case, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a basic principle of Korean competition enforcement: the MRFTA applies across industries, and the KFTC's enforcement authority is not lightly displaced, unless a special statutory provision explicitly stipulates otherwise. In Evergreen, the Court corrected the Seoul High Court's readiness to exclude the possibility of competition enforcement by the KFTC, even in the absence of an explicit statutory exemption.

The detailed economic and legal context of this case was discussed in my previous article (Lee 2025, pp 11–14). In this piece, putting the details aside, there are three points worth recalling.

First, a number of international liner shipping companies, including Evergreen, engaged in price-fixing by agreeing on freight rates. They were later sanctioned by the KFTC (KFTC Decision No 2022–090 of 11 April 2022). Second, that enforcement action, however, met strong resistance. This was because Article 29 of the Marine Transportation Act (MTA) permits certain cooperative practices by liner shipping operators and vests regulatory authority in the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries (MOF). From the shipping side, it was argued that even if the conduct had exceeded the permissible bounds of the MTA, the matter still fell to the MOF, not the KFTC, because the regulatory framework in the MTA should be understood as a “self-complete†exemption from the MRFTA, as argued by Bongeui Lee (Seoul National University) (Lee 2023, here). Third, the Seoul High Court accepted the argument and denied the KFTC's authority to enforce the MRFTA (Seoul High Court 2022Nu43742 Decided 1 February 2024).

The Supreme Court reversed. In essence, it first reaffirmed the basic principle that the MRFTA applies to all industries unless other statutes expressly provide otherwise (Evergreen, pp 4–6) and made clear that the MTA contains no such express exclusion (p 6). On that premise, the Court held that, at least with respect to the conduct at issue (specifically, unreported cartels), which fell outside the bounds contemplated by the MTA, the two statutes, the MTA and the MRFTA, were not to be regarded as inconsistent or mutually exclusive, and that the MOF and the KFTC could hold overlapping authority (pp 6–7). Also, the Court pointed to the institutional capacity limits of the MTA's reporting- and document-submission-based framework, noting that this framework was seriously insufficient for the MOF to detect and properly regulate concealed cartels (pp 7–8). More broadly, it referred to the international trend toward the general application of competition law in the shipping sector, including developments in the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, and Japan (p 8).

In my understanding, the real significance of the judgement is not that the Supreme Court declared the KFTC necessarily right on the merits. Nor did it simply dismiss the industrial and institutional distinctiveness of the shipping sector. Rather, the focal point is that the Supreme Court corrected the Seoul High Court's approach of carving out the entire sector from the application of competition law, in the absence of an explicit statutory exemption. The Supreme Court held that the lower court erred in concluding that the KFTC lacked authority. This means that, instead of granting a sectoral exemption by interpretation, the lower court should have assessed the conduct within the general framework of Article 116 (then Article 58) of the MRFTA, under which only ‘reasonable and necessary conduct performed within the scope explicitly recognised by other rules specifying exceptions to free competition' qualifies as an exception (even though such a narrow and strict standard has rarely been satisfied in practice). This issue will now be examined on remand.

To be sure, this ruling has not been welcomed by everyone. Shipping law scholars, such as Inhyun Kim (Korea University), have criticised the decision for failing to give sufficient weight to the MTA’s autonomy and the industry's institutional realities. The persuasiveness of that criticism will ultimately be tested within, not outside, the MRFTA's general assessment framework.

Additionally, in my view, the Supreme Court's approach deserves praise in a broader and more fundamental sense for its balanced, judicially restrained approach. The deeper problem with the Seoul High Court's judgement was that it tried to effectively reconstruct the relationship between the administrative agencies' powers as if it were necessarily exclusive, despite the absence of a clear statutory basis for doing so. At bottom, that is a matter of institutional design more properly left to the legislature or the executive, not the judiciary. In fact, as seen above, under the current statutory scheme, the more plausible inference was to recognise overlapping KFTC authority, especially as a backstop against regulatory inaction on the shipping side. Academically speaking, the overlapping powers of two agencies can be justified as a form of parallel redundancy, which may reduce the risk of erroneous omission, that is, false negatives (see, e.g., Heimann 1993). There is no need to overstate this institutional-design concern here. Still, the case is instructive in showing why courts should be more cautious about displacing the basic structure of competition law applicability so easily.

 

Conclusion

The 2025 developments discussed above show that the MRFTA continued to operate as a powerful and versatile instrument of public enforcement. Not only the KFTC but also the KPS remained highly active as public enforcers. At times, however, enforcement appeared overly assertive, particularly given the MRFTA's wide statutory net, including the breadth of the UTP rules and the wide scope of criminal liability. In this context, the Supreme Court's moderating role through judicial review became more visible in 2025, helping to recalibrate the balance between over- and under-enforcement on a case-by-case basis. 

Amid growing pressure from domestic politics, geopolitics, and the US trade pressure from the Trump administration, Korean competition law and policy are already facing significant challenges, and it remains to be seen whether they can maintain a balanced trajectory in 2026.

 

 

Acknowledgment:

This work was supported by the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Japan and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP24H00013.