European regulators open a new front on algorithmic pricing

Algorithmic pricing enforcement has been a largely American story so far, centered on the Department of Justice's case against RealPage. That's starting to change. A senior European Commission official confirmed at a July 2025 conference that the EC was actively looking at multiple algorithmic pricing antitrust investigations, though as of the most recent public reporting, none had yet resulted in a final decision — European investigations in this area remain, in the words of one law firm's 2026 antitrust preview, "still in their infancy."

Poland has moved further and faster than the EU level. The president of Poland's antitrust authority, UOKiK, confirmed in September 2025 that it was investigating potential collusion via algorithmic pricing tools specifically in the banking and pharmaceutical sectors — industries where shared, third-party pricing or risk-scoring software is common and where the RealPage-style concern (competitors indirectly coordinating through a shared algorithm rather than direct communication) applies just as easily as it does to apartment rents.

The substantive legal theory traveling across jurisdictions is consistent: when multiple competitors rely on the same third-party algorithm, fed by pooled data that includes non-public, competitively sensitive information from those same competitors, the algorithm itself can become the mechanism of coordination even without any direct communication between the competing firms — a "hub and spoke" theory of harm that doesn't require proving an explicit agreement, only that the pooled-data structure produced coordinated outcomes.

For any company operating pricing software across both the U.S. and Europe, the practical implication is that the RealPage settlement's specific compliance terms — data-age minimums, no real-time competitor data, no pricing recommendations below a certain geographic granularity — are a reasonable template for a global compliance baseline, not just a U.S.-specific fix, given how clearly European and Polish regulators are watching the same legal theory develop.