South Korea's National Assembly audit season, held each autumn, has a habit of turning into a public spectacle. This year, the hearing of the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) looks set to be dominated by a single subject: Coupang. Multiple allegations against the country's largest e-commerce company — obstructing regulatory inspections, imposing unfair contract terms on delivery-app partners — have converged on the same forum, putting the question of market-power abuse squarely in the spotlight.
Obstruction of inquiry: where does the law draw the line?
The first and most legally charged allegation concerns whether Coupang impeded a KFTC on-site inspection. Article 81 of South Korea's Fair Trade Act prohibits companies from refusing, obstructing or evading such inspections; violations carry penalties of up to two years in prison or a fine of up to 150m won (roughly $110,000). Coupang insists it acted within the law, subjecting every step to legal review — a position that has turned the threshold question of what constitutes obstruction into a dispute in its own right.
Competition-law specialists note that clashes between companies and regulators over the scope of co-operation duties have become a recurring feature of platform oversight. "Without clearer statutory language," one expert observed, "similar standoffs will keep recurring." The pattern is not new: a comparable dispute arose during the KFTC's 2023 investigation into Naver's shopping-search algorithm, underscoring a structural tension between powerful digital platforms and the authorities meant to police them.
Most-favoured-nation clauses: the shadow of vertical integration
The second front concerns Coupang Eats, the company's food-delivery arm. Coupang is accused of pressing restaurants listed on the app to offer it terms at least as favourable as those given to rival platforms — the so-called most-favoured-nation (MFN) clause. The concern is that Coupang's tightly integrated logistics empire — encompassing Rocket Delivery and Rocket Fresh, its same-day grocery service — gives it the leverage to replicate the same playbook in food delivery.
Regulators elsewhere have moved against exactly this kind of clause. The European Union's Digital Markets Act bars large platforms from using MFN provisions as a matter of principle. Germany's Federal Cartel Office ordered Amazon to drop a similar clause; the US Federal Trade Commission has been tightening its scrutiny of platform self-preferencing. In South Korea, the KFTC itself intervened in 2023 over Baemin's (Delivery Hero's Korean subsidiary) commission-structure overhaul, suggesting that Coupang Eats could face a similar regulatory trajectory.
Market power by the numbers
The scale of Coupang's dominance lends urgency to the debate. According to Statistics Korea's online-shopping surveys, Coupang has held the top position in domestic e-commerce by market share for several consecutive years; its estimated gross merchandise value for 2024 exceeded 40trn won (about $29bn). Coupang Eats, meanwhile, is rapidly closing the gap on market leader Baemin, consolidating its position as the second-largest food-delivery platform in the country. Regulators worry about what competition lawyers call "leveraging" — using a dominant position in one market to gain advantage in another — a risk that Coupang's multi-platform structure makes particularly salient.
Academics in competition law draw an explicit comparison with Amazon. "Coupang's business model is essentially a Korean replica of the Amazon playbook," one scholar noted. "Just as Amazon has become a primary target of antitrust enforcement in both the United States and the EU, Coupang is approaching a regulatory inflection point."
A tale of three constituencies
Views on Coupang differ sharply depending on where one sits. For consumers, the case in its favour is straightforward: Rocket Delivery is fast, reliable and competitively priced. The Korea Consumer Agency has ranked Coupang at or near the top of delivery-satisfaction surveys for several years running.
Small merchants tell a different story. Long-standing complaints allege that Coupang's algorithm systematically favours products enrolled in its Rocket Delivery programme and places its own private-label goods prominently in search results. A 2024 survey of online sellers conducted by the Korea Federation of SMEs found that more than half of respondents had experienced what they described as unfair platform practices. Rival companies echo the concern, arguing that they cannot compete on a level playing field while Coupang combines logistics infrastructure, marketplace reach and its own branded products under one roof.
The limits of parliamentary scrutiny
The National Assembly audit is, by its nature, a political event. Its record as an instrument of structural reform is modest: Naver and Kakao have both been summoned to similar hearings repeatedly in recent years, with limited tangible consequences. Genuine reform, experts argue, requires two things that parliamentary theatre cannot supply: an adequately resourced and independent KFTC capable of processing complex cases swiftly, and statutory rules tailored to the realities of platform markets.
South Korea has been debating a dedicated Online Platform Fairness Act — broadly analogous to the EU's Digital Markets Act — for several years without result. The legislative impasse reflects an unresolved tension between the government's desire to nurture a globally competitive platform industry and the imperative to protect consumers and small businesses. The result, critics contend, is a regulatory vacuum that existing competition law is ill-equipped to fill.
Outlook: a regulatory fork in the road
Whether this autumn's hearings will translate into concrete sanctions against Coupang remains uncertain. Yet with the KFTC running several parallel investigations into the company, the political pressure generated by the audit season may well accelerate both the pace and the scope of its inquiries. In the near term, the most likely outcome is a demand that Coupang Eats revise its contracting practices. Over the medium term, the broader question of legal standards for platform self-preferencing — currently undefined in Korean law — will need to be resolved.
If these hearings are to amount to more than political theatre, the debate must shift from adversarial grandstanding to evidence-based analysis of market structure. The long-term health of South Korea's platform economy depends on building a regulatory framework in which innovation and fair competition can coexist. Whether this particular moment of scrutiny proves to be the catalyst for that framework is the question worth watching.