The Seoul High Court upholds the South Korean FTC’s decision to sanction “self-preferencing” as an abuse of dominance (NAVER shopping)

It would no longer be surprising to see competition or regulatory authorities blaming digital platforms for favouring their own services on their own platforms. In particular, in Europe, seeing the General Court’s Google decisions (see e.g., Johannes Persch’s blog posts on Shopping and Android ) and the self-preferencing obligation of the Digital Markets Act (see, e.g., Article 6(5) of the Digital Markets Act, ‘DMA’), it looks that the epithet self-preferencing is now well-established as a legal concept, albeit controversial. In fact, the triumph of the self-preferencing doctrine is not confined to Europe but is found in many other jurisdictions as well. Korea is a case in point. On December 14, 2022, the Seoul High Court decided that the Korean competition authority (i.e., Korea Fair