Winston & Strawn LLP | Peter Crowther

Global | United Kingdom | USA

This article is an extract from Lexology Panoramic: Competition Compliance 2026. Click here for the full guide.

Amid persistent inflationary pressures, heightened geopolitical volatility, accelerating disruption from advanced technologies and leadership changes across competition authorities and governments around the world, competition enforcement and regulatory activity remained robust in 2025. The importance of ensuring compliance with competition law, therefore, remains undiminished. Companies need effective compliance programmes in place to mitigate risk; yet identifying those risks and guarding against them can be difficult, particularly for multinational companies operating under myriad laws and legal systems.

While individual and tailored advice is always of critical importance, this edition of Lexology Panoramic Competition Compliance aims to provide legal practitioners, in-house counsel, and those in business with an overview of competition compliance in many jurisdictions around the world. Each jurisdictional overview considers competition compliance in key areas, including

  • attitudes to compliance;
  • requirements of compliance programmes;
  • dealings with competitors; cartels and leniency programmes;
  • dealings with commercial partners;
  • behaviour as a dominant player in a market;
  • mergers and acquisitions; investigations; and
  • key developments and future reform.

Trends

Each jurisdiction presents distinct compliance challenges, shaped by such factors as the maturity of its legal framework and enforcement mechanisms, political developments and resultant policy changes, economic conditions and cultural attitudes towards compliance. Notwithstanding these differences, competition authorities around the world are grappling with a number of common issues. This section highlights several of those overarching trends and themes, together with illustrative examples of issues that have emerged in specific jurisdictions.

Antitrust

Across the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere, competition authorities have recently experienced leadership transitions. Global antitrust enforcement remains active and interventionist, but with greater attention to economic growth, national security, and closer alignment with industrial and digital policy, as well as political objectives across jurisdictions.

As in previous years, digital markets and tech giants have continued to dominate headlines worldwide, with regulators showing no signs of easing their scrutiny of Big Tech companies for alleged anticompetitive practices, including exclusivity agreements, bundling and platform dominance. The implementation of significant new legislation – including the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA) – reflects substantial efforts to address competition concerns in the digital economy. The European Commission’s enforcement under the DMA has entered a new phase as the Commission shifted from monitoring to active investigations and issued findings against several ‘gatekeepers’ requiring the changes to address interoperability, advertising, and self-preferencing concerns. The DMCCA came into effect on 1 January 2025, granting enhanced investigatory and enforcement powers to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to designate firms with ‘strategic market status’ and impose conduct requirements and pro-competition interventions to promote competition in digital markets and protect consumers from unfair practices by large technology firms.

Digital platform oversight continued elsewhere. For example, Germany secured commitments from Google to remove interoperability restrictions in Google Maps. Japan combined classic enforcement and commitments with sector-wide rule-making, obtaining a cease-and-desist order against Google and rolling out subordinate legislation and guidelines for the new Mobile Software Competition Act – Japan’s parallel to app store governance. In Latin America, Chile’s competition authority expanded its assertive posture by filing an abuse of dominance case against Google and requesting a significant fine. Although efforts to pass reform legislation targeting competition in the tech sector have stalled in the United States, Big Tech continues to be a major focus of US federal and state enforcers, as well as private litigants. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) won a second landmark monopolisation case against Google relating to the monopolisation of the advertising technology (adtech) market after a 2024 decision finding that Google held a monopoly in general internet search services. Challenges to Apple and other tech firms brought by federal and state enforcers, as well as private litigants, remain pending.

Cartel enforcement also continued to be a key focus globally, with authorities conducting dawn raids and using sophisticated technology tools to detect potential collusion. In 2025, competition authorities in the EU conducted dawn raids across food and beverage, construction/building materials, transport and logistics, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and automotive‑related sectors, while the United Kingdom carried out raids in construction chemicals and building products markets. Over the same period, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) conducted dawn raids in the fuel retail/energy sector, targeting suspected price‑fixing involving gasoline and diesel. Raids bring additional risks, including potential penalties for obstruction and increased expenses from follow-on litigation.

Regulators expanded the use of AI‑assisted screening tools to analyse pricing data, bidding patterns, public statements, and large datasets generated through merger filings, allowing agencies to identify potential coordination risks without relying solely on whistleblowers or complaints. In parallel, the United States introduced a new Antitrust Whistleblower Rewards Program, offering financial incentives to individuals who report criminal antitrust violations, further broadening the pipeline of cartel detection. Together, these developments are raising expectations for corporate compliance systems, as companies face enforcement authorities that are increasingly data‑driven, better resourced, and less dependent on voluntary disclosures.

Competition concerns in labour markets moved decisively from investigation to enforcement in 2025, with competition authorities across jurisdictions imposing first‑of‑their‑kind fines and clarifying that wage‑fixing and no‑poach arrangements constitute hardcore antitrust violations. The European Commission issued its first infringement decision and fine in a no‑poach case, while the UK CMA adopted its first labour‑market decision, sanctioning information exchanges on freelance pay in the broadcasting sector. Meanwhile, in Japan, the Freelance Act – effective since late 2024 – entered its first full year of enforcement in 2025, with the JFTC actively issuing guidance and recommendations to address unfair trading practices affecting freelancers and gig‑economy workers. US agencies remain focused on labour markets with the DOJ securing its first jury trial conviction for wage fixing in 2025. While the new FTC under the Trump administration withdrew its appeal of the court order blocking the rule banning most non-compete agreements nationwide, it has continued to take a case-by-case approach to assessing any anticompetitive effects of non-compete agreements.

Mergers

In 2025, global merger control was widely characterised as a year of turbulence and transition, shaped by leadership changes, political recalibration, and increasing policy influence over traditional competition analysis, all of which make the regulatory environment more complex for businesses. Regulations aimed at addressing the competitive impact of foreign subsidies and ensuring fair competition add a new layer of complexity to the deal-making landscape. The convergence of foreign investment review and merger control has become crucial as parties navigate the increasing complexity of cross-border merger approval, often intertwined with considerations of economic nationalism. Merger enforcement has become more explicitly linked to industrial policy, national security, and geopolitical considerations, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

US antitrust regulators under the second Trump administration continued several inherited challenges but showed a clearer willingness to resolve cases through settlements and remedies, signalling a retreat from the prior administration’s preference for litigating merger challenges over accepting divestiture settlements and negotiated outcomes. The amended Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act notification process, requiring merging parties to disclose substantially more information, data and documents to the agencies, came into effect in February 2025 but was blocked by a district court in February 2026. The order has been stayed for the time being while the FTC appeals the decision. Absent a successful appeal, transacting parties will be able to return to using the less burdensome earlier version of the HSR form to report transactions. While the US federal agencies were less aggressive in challenging deals, state enforcers are increasingly scrutinising transactions and passing ‘mini HSR’ laws requiring notification to state authorities of deals, particularly in the healthcare space.

In the United Kingdom, the replacement of the CMA chair and government policy is redirecting merger control toward a more domestically focused and pro‑growth posture. In the European Union, the European Commission advanced a comprehensive consultation on its Merger Guidelines to incorporate dynamic competition effects, innovation, and non‑price considerations, while national authorities increasingly relied on discretionary intervention tools. Overall, jurisdictional reach and procedural complexity expanded globally, increasing execution risk for cross‑border transactions. Authorities are moving beyond traditional turnover‑based thresholds and considering broader theories of competitive harm, particularly where transactions involve digital markets, serial acquisitions, or strategic assets.

Conclusion

Competition authorities in jurisdictions across the world are actively monitoring markets and intervening with regularity. Accordingly, it remains essential to maintain an effective compliance programme and to continue to monitor and update processes and policies on a regular basis. Such efforts, undertaken as part of a cohesive global compliance strategy, undoubtedly enhance the likelihood of ensuring smooth and uninterrupted business operations on a global basis.

This article first appeared on Lexology | Source