Four experts predict some of the trends that will define European competition in 2026.
Labor’s Year
Jan Broulík, Amsterdam Law School
In 2026, European competition law will increasingly turn its attention to labor markets, an area long overlooked in enforcement. The past year marked a turning point: the European Commission imposed its first-ever fine for a labor market cartel (Delivery Hero/Glovo in the food delivery sector) and explicitly raised labor market effects as a topic in its public consultation on the merger control guidelines. This shift is set to deepen in the year ahead.
The Commission’s merger guidelines review remains ongoing. Although not all respondents to the consultation endorsed incorporating labor-related concerns, the issue will be back on the table at a stakeholder workshop on January 20, in a dedicated session on mergers and monopsony. A draft of the revised guidelines is expected in the spring, with final adoption anticipated by year-end. Whether and how labor market concentration and monopsony power will be factored into merger assessments remains to be seen.
On the enforcement side, 2026 may bring a new wave of antitrust actions against employer collusion. In November 2024, the Commission carried out unannounced inspections of companies in the data center construction sector over suspected no-poach agreements. That investigation, still ongoing, could yield findings or fines this year. National authorities are also likely to press ahead, with Poland among those expected to pursue no-poach enforcement more assertively.
The legal landscape will also be shaped by EU’s highest court. The Court of Justice is expected to issue a landmark ruling in Tondela, its first case involving a no-poach agreement. At issue is a pact between Portuguese football clubs not to hire each other’s players during the disrupted 2019–2020 season. Whether the Court follows the advocate general’s view that such agreements may be justifiable when designed to preserve the integrity of sports could set an important precedent for how labor market restraints are treated under Article 101 TFEU.
Labor markets’ moment in EU competition law has arrived. The coming year will likely see employment-related competition concerns move from the margins to the mainstream. As enforcers rethink merger control and crack down on collusive hiring practices, longstanding assumptions may be tested, including whose welfare matters under competition law.
The Review of the DMA To Address the Rise of Artificial Intelligence
Alba Ribera Martinez, Universidad Villanueva
Technological change had already outrun the regulatory scope of the European Union’s pivotal Digital Markets Act, enacted in 2022 to address the unique competition issues that have arisen in the age of Big Tech platforms. By November that year, emerging artificial intelligence firms such as OpenAI had released their large language models in the form of chatbots, which became the fastest-growing application in history. Since then, chatbots, AI agents, AI personas and the embedding of AI features into regular services (e.g., search engines or online marketplaces) have flooded the digital market and fundamentally transformed the user experience for millions of consumers online.
The DMA compels the European Commission to review, at least every three years, whether the current design of the regulation matches the economic reality. Such a review touches upon the designation of the Big Tech gatekeepers like Alphabet and Amazon as well as the list of services captured by the regulation, such as search and advertising. For its 2026 review, the Commission has already said that it will look at AI and determine whether a regulatory amendment is warranted to meet the challenges AI poses to the DMA’s objectives of contestability and fairness. In parallel, the Commission will also address whether the scope of the DMA’s interoperability obligations should be extended to social networks or whether the regulation has delivered on its main objectives for now.
Academics, practitioners, members of the European Parliament, and policymakers have discussed the topic at large, and they have reached completely different conclusions by doing so. Some argue that the European AI Act already tackles the potential regulatory challenges posed by AI, like increasing the transparency and observability of the training data that goes into an AI model. Others hold that a substantial reframing of the DMA (by expanding its scope of application) is necessary to adapt to the current configuration of the market. If one looks to the substantive provisions of the DMA, the integration of AI is not so straightforward, since most of the mandates are fundamentally incompatible with the functioning and mechanics involved in large language models, such as the prohibition on combinations of personal data across services or the regulation’s interoperability obligations. In the first quarter of 2026, the European Commission is expected to issue its report detailing what enforcement strategy will apply with respect to AI in the context of the DMA.
One gets a sense of anticipation from the Commission’s current enforcement of Article 102 of the TFEU, the EU’s fundamental competition law, that the DMA’s enforcer will, in the end, not subject (or at least, not entirely) generative AI tools via the ex-ante regulation of the DMA, which it does for the Big Tech platforms. In the last couple of months of 2025, it triggered two sanctioning proceedings against two Big Tech companies for the way in which their AI tools are bundled with their services and with respect to the unfairness embedded in the training of their language models. The startups may escape this fate for now.
The European Commission faces a fundamental choice: to stretch the DMA’s mold to fit the age of AI or to lean on existing antitrust provisions. Ultimately, the effectiveness of EU digital policy will be judged not by the volume of its rules, but by its ability to remain relevant in a market that moves faster than the ink can dry on its legislation.
The Reform That Will Raise Antitrust From Its Deathbed
Rupprecht Podszun, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
It is commonly accepted that competition law is on its deathbed. Industrial policy is being promoted again as a savior for European firms, and ever more sectors are getting their own competition-like rules (such as the Digital Markets Act or the regulatory unfair trading practices for agriculture and rural development). It’s a gloomy outlook. But why is that, and what might revitalise this much-loved patient in 2026?
H. L. A. Hart, the famous legal philosopher, distinguished between primary and secondary rules. Primary rules create substantive obligations and impose duties: they tell people what is not allowed under the law. Do not steal from your consumers. Do not exploit your customers. Do not block market entry. Secondary rules, on the other hand, are rules about rules: how to manage and enforce primary rules and how to adjudicate. It is these secondary rules that will catch our attention in the coming year.
The more substantive part of antitrust law has already been revisited. We debated the integration of other goals into the duty program, such as sustainability. We placed competition into the democracy debate. We also pushed back against the more economic approach, which in some of its forms had sucked all normative value out of competition law. These debates will continue, of course. They are inherent in the open texture of legislation. However, the community has found relatively steady ground here.
It is now important to reclaim the “effet utile” of competition law. Competition law was once seen as a highly effective field, admired by many from an external viewpoint. This was lost in lengthy legal battles. Cases take far too long to resolve, whether in court or within agencies. The sheer size of investigations, documents, and data has become unmanageable. The number of lawyers and economists working on major cases has grown disproportionately. Third parties, particularly civil society, are not treated with the respect they deserve. Access to files remains a pain. Lawyers often take issue with what they perceive as unfairness. Officials echo this sentiment, but vice versa.
In 2026, the reform of Regulation 1/2003, which contains the central legal framework for procedures in EU competition law, will provide a forum for discussions about good administration, which is a basic right according to Article 41 of the Charter. The new director general of the Directorate-Generale for Competition (DG COMP) will have the file on the desk from day one. First signs are there: In the Meta AI probe, DG COMP Commissioner Teresa Ribera referred to interim measures, which are rarely used in competition proceedings. The DMA, now in full swing, will demonstrate the effectiveness of some of the procedural reforms, such as strict time limits and clear-cut presumptions. Ongoing industrial policy challenges will test the institutional design of competition law.
Competition law must stick to the primary rules but work on the secondary ones if it is to stop the creeping decline of the basic legal framework for the economy.
The (Geo)politicization of Antitrust
Konstantinos Stylianou, University of Glasgow
In various ways, antitrust law has always been political. From the priority setting process competition authorities use to choose their areas of focus, to the appointment of authorities’ leadership even in jurisdictions where they are statutorily independent, to the inevitable entanglement of competition authorities’ work with the rest of the economy, antitrust law operates alongside national government priorities and international influences.
But as of recent, politics and geopolitics have become a defining force of antitrust in ways that upend the technocratic approach of the last half century. The most influential antitrust jurisdictions—the United States, European Union, and China—have all shown signs of this trend, and I suspect that the trend will continue and strengthen in 2026. Going forward, I observe at least three ways by which antitrust’s politicization will be different compared to the past.
Firstly, the (geo)political pressure is becoming constant, explicit, and normalized. It is constant because it is not limited to high-profile cases (which could justify political intervention, e.g. the GE/Honeywell merger), but rather it comes up frequently around facts that seem less about antitrust law and more about political developments. China’s investigation into Google right after U.S. President Donald Trump announced tariffs against the country and into Nvidia later that year around trade talks are two examples. So is the U.S.’ threat to go after European tech firms in a tit-for-tat fashion for the EU’s antitrust action against U.S. Big Tech companies. It is explicit because there is little effort to conceal the political nature of the influence, with countless direct and open threats of and because of antitrust enforcement. And it is normalized because it is not only common but comes from multiple sources of the political and diplomatic scene. It is not just Trump or the chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that have made inflammatory political comments. The influence of politics and international affairs show up in the European Commission’s work (e.g. around defense), European national competition authorities (e.g. around strategic autonomy), and EU legislative procedures and enforcement (e.g. DMA’s application).
Secondly, and this should be quite obvious, we are seeing increased direct interference into antitrust enforcement and heightened animosity between ideologies that often fall along political lines. The firing of the two Democratic FTC commissioners on the grounds of policy misalignment and the acrimonious statements against antitrust policy initiatives at the House Judiciary Committee hearing and American First comments at the annual International Competition Network conference are signs of this trend from the U.S. In the U.K., the government fired the Competition and Markets Authority chair for insufficient support of the government’s growth agenda.
Thirdly, companies are increasingly willing to play this game. While they sometimes risk being on the losing end, since the game is unpredictable, they are likely realizing that strategic acquiescence is likely in their long-term favor. And while this is expected in China’s state-driven economy (where companies are punished if they fall out of line), we are now seeing Big Tech firms supporting or paying lip service to the U.S. government for fear of retaliation.
I expect these trends to continue. Geoeconomics is taking hold too and the forces that animated the (geo)politicization of antitrust show no signs of abatement. And while these trends will contaminate the legal doctrine of antitrust, they are also an opportunity for antitrust to mature beyond technocracy.
Authors’ Disclosures: The authors report no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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