Korea’s NAVER Shopping: A Misguided Replica of the EU’s Google Shopping Decision?
The Supreme Court of Korea’s Oct. 16 decision in the long-awaited NAVER Shopping case delivered a resounding defeat for the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC). In finding that NAVER—a local search-based platform that competes with Google in Korea—had not violated Korean competition law, the court overturned both the KFTC’s January 2021 decision and the December 2022 decision of the Seoul High Court.
The court’s judgment is particularly notable for the broader antitrust community, because it represents—along with the social backlash against the Korean government’s platform-regulation initiatives of the early 2020s—one of the most significant pushbacks against the government’s recent pursuit of the EU’s regulatory approach to the digital economy.
Just as the previous attempts to transplant Digital Markets Act (DMA)-style regulation failed amid social resistance, the enforcer’s hasty effort to make a “self-preferencing case” (misaligned with Korea’s market and institutional context) has now been halted by this ruling. It is a rightful correction—one that offers valuable lessons for non-EU jurisdictions seeking to design their own digital competition governance frameworks.