Australia's competition and consumer watchdog today outlined its enforcement priorities for 2026-27, placing manipulative online practices, misleading pricing claims in supermarkets and essential services, and anti-competitive conduct at the center of its agenda. The announcement, made at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) event in Sydney on 19 February 2026, signals that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will maintain sustained pressure on digital markets while also scrutinizing motor vehicle guarantees and new government-legislated reforms.

ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb delivered the annual priorities address. According to Cass-Gottlieb, "Our priorities are grounded in the understanding that competition and consumer trust are vital to a productive, resilient economy." The statement set the tone for what amounts to a broad mandate: press harder on digital deception, tackle pricing opacity in everyday spending categories, and step up education for businesses facing new legal obligations.

Dark patterns and subscription traps take center stage

The most pointed section of the announcement concerns manipulative and false practices in digital markets. The ACCC will specifically target subscription traps and what the regulator calls "dark patterns" - interface designs that guide consumers toward decisions they might not otherwise make, often involving hidden costs or difficult cancellation flows.

According to Cass-Gottlieb, "This priority recognises the emergence of practices including subscription traps and other dark patterns that manipulate consumer behaviour and unfairly impact consumer choice." She added that the rise in unsafe consumer goods across digital channels, enabled by the scale of online marketplaces, also falls within this priority's scope.

The ACCC's concern is not theoretical. The commission has spent the past year building enforcement cases in this space. In September 2025, the ACCC filed Federal Court proceedings against JustAnswer LLC, alleging the US-based online advice service misled Australian consumers about pricing by advertising an AU$2 joining fee when monthly fees actually ranged between AU$50 and AU$90. A month later, in October 2025, the regulator initiated proceedings against Microsoft Corporation and its Australian subsidiary, claiming Microsoft misled approximately 2.7 million Australians about subscription options when integrating its Copilot AI assistant into Microsoft 365 plans - allegedly concealing a lower-priced "Classic" tier to steer consumers toward more expensive AI-integrated offerings.

These cases did not emerge in isolation. The ACCC's five-year Digital Platform Services Inquiry, which concluded in March 2025, produced extensive data on the scale of the problem. A survey of over 3,000 Australians found that 72% had encountered potentially unfair practices on online marketplaces within a 12-month period, including hidden charges (21%), forced subscription sign-ups (24%), and accidental paid subscriptions (10%). That inquiry - which ran from 2020 through March 2025 and delivered 35 recommendations to the Australian Government - forms the analytical backbone of the 2026-27 priorities.

The marketing community has reason to pay close attention. Subscription-based digital services have become a dominant model across software, media, and e-commerce. Regulators worldwide are questioning whether the technical design of cancellation flows, pricing disclosures, and renewal notifications meets legal obligations. In Australia, the ACCC has demonstrated it will pursue cases involving both domestic operators and large international technology companies if practices appear to fall short of the Australian Consumer Law.

Pricing accuracy in supermarkets and essential services

Alongside digital deception, the ACCC has earmarked pricing accuracy in supermarkets and essential services as a continuing priority. The focus on supermarkets reflects persistent cost-of-living pressures in Australia. According to Cass-Gottlieb, "Accurate pricing information is fundamental to effective competition. When discount claims mislead, consumers cannot make informed choices and businesses that follow the rules may be disadvantaged."

This is not a new concern for the commission, but the framing for 2026-27 extends it specifically to telecommunications and energy. According to Cass-Gottlieb, "Essential services, including telecommunications, electricity and gas, involve complex pricing structures that make it difficult for consumers and small businesses to compare offers and exercise choice." The implication is clear: where complexity itself becomes a barrier to informed decision-making, regulatory scrutiny follows.

In November 2025, the ACCC ran a Black Friday advertising enforcement sweep targeting misleading pricing tactics including countdown timers that did not correspond to actual sale durations, false site-wide discount claims, and deceptive strikethrough pricing. That sweep built on a 2024 enforcement cycle in which Michael Hill, My House, and Hairhouse each paid penalties for misleading Black Friday representations. Several investigations from the 2024 cycle were still ongoing when the 2025 sweep began.

For advertisers and marketers, particularly those operating in retail and utilities sectors, the commission's emphasis on pricing disclosure has direct operational implications. Discount claims, comparative price advertising, and any promotional communication that implies savings must be grounded in accurate reference prices. The ACCC has consistently argued that retailers who follow the rules are disadvantaged when competitors use deceptive pricing to inflate perceived value - a competitive harm argument as well as a consumer harm argument.

Competition in digital markets: structural concerns remain

The ACCC's enduring priorities, which Cass-Gottlieb confirmed will continue alongside the new ones, include cartel conduct, exclusionary behavior, and the misuse of market power. These apply with particular force to digital platform markets, where the commission has been building enforcement capacity for years.

In December 2025, the Federal Court ordered Google Asia Pacific to pay A$55 million in penalties for anti-competitive understandings with telecommunications companies Telstra and Optus that required exclusive pre-installation of Google Search on Android devices between December 2019 and March 2021. The case was initiated by the ACCC and represented one of the largest competition penalties in the regulator's history against a technology firm in Australia.

According to Cass-Gottlieb, "Competition drives productivity by incentivising investment, innovation and efficiency. And competition law, and its rigorous enforcement, are important contributors to productivity growth." The commission will continue working with Treasury to progress digital competition reforms, which have been under consultation since December 2024. The proposed digital competition regime, which drew submissions through February 2025, would give the ACCC new powers to regulate large digital platforms with designated market status - a framework modeled in part on the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and the EU's Digital Markets Act.

International context for digital competition enforcement has grown substantially. The European Commission has enforced the DMA against seven designated gatekeepers since 2023. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority launched designation investigations targeting Apple and Google in 2025. Australia's approach, described by government as positioning the country as a "fast-follower," involves potential mutual recognition mechanisms to reduce regulatory divergence between jurisdictions.

In December 2025, the ACCC also published a comprehensive snapshot of artificial intelligence developments, warning of consumer risks from agentic AI systems, AI-generated fake reviews, privacy-degrading practices, and misleading claims about AI capabilities. That document identified growth in AI-generated fake reviews exceeding 1,000% on certain platforms between 2022 and 2025, raising particular concerns for e-commerce advertisers who rely on review signals for both organic discovery and paid advertising optimization.

Motor vehicle consumer guarantees

A targeted new focus within the 2026-27 priorities concerns consumer guarantees in the motor vehicle sector. Accessing consumer guarantee rights - the right to a remedy when a product fails to meet guaranteed standards - remains one of the most frequently reported issues raised with the ACCC. Motor vehicles represent a high-value category where disputes over guarantee obligations can be financially significant for consumers.

According to Cass-Gottlieb, "Purchasing a motor vehicle is one of the most significant purchases that many consumers will make, and when an issue arises with their vehicle that is covered by consumer guarantees then businesses must meet their obligation to fulfil this basic consumer right." The ACCC's approach for 2026-27 includes "exploring different approaches to achieve compliance, including working collaboratively with industry to deliver changes for the benefit of consumers."

This signals a preference for cooperative compliance mechanisms before moving to formal enforcement - a pattern the ACCC has used in other sectors to achieve faster systemic change than litigation alone permits.

New government reforms require compliance education

Over the past year, the Australian Government announced several significant reforms touching areas of direct relevance to businesses and marketers. These include a new mandatory merger notification regime that took effect 1 January 2026, unfair trading practices protections that will include prohibitions on subscription traps and manipulative online practices, and the Scams Prevention Framework Act 2025, which established the National Anti-Scam Centre within the ACCC.

The ACCC's response to these reforms for 2026-27 is an explicit commitment to education and compliance activity, not just enforcement. According to Cass-Gottlieb, "We welcome the suite of reforms that have been announced and will proactively engage with businesses to promote compliance and ensure they understand their obligations as these reforms come into effect." She added that while improving business compliance remains the priority, observed non-compliance would prompt consideration of the most appropriate enforcement tool.

For digital marketers and advertising technology operators, several of these reforms carry operational weight. The unfair trading practices prohibitions, once enacted, will codify restrictions on subscription traps and dark patterns that the ACCC has already been pursuing under existing misleading conduct provisions. Businesses operating subscription-based advertising tools, audience data platforms, or any service with automated renewal structures in Australia need to assess their current flows against both existing law and the anticipated legislative changes.

The new merger regime creates a mandatory notification obligation for acquisitions meeting specified thresholds, with the ACCC as the primary decision-maker rather than the Australian Competition Tribunal. Acquisitions by major advertising technology platforms, given the scale of their Australian revenues, are likely to meet notification requirements. The Treasury has committed to reviewing threshold levels twelve months after implementation.

What this means for digital advertising

Australia's digital advertising market reached A$17.2 billion in financial year 2025, according to industry data, with video advertising growing nearly 22% and search advertising maintaining stable performance. Against this commercial backdrop, the ACCC's enforcement priorities shape the regulatory environment within which programmatic advertising, platform advertising, and consumer-facing digital services operate.

Marketers running campaigns on digital platforms face an environment where the platforms themselves are under regulatory scrutiny for their treatment of consumers and business users. Cases against Google for search exclusivity, cases against Microsoft for subscription manipulation, and the broader focus on dark patterns create a context in which transparency is not optional. Accurate pricing, clear subscription terms, and truthful discount claims are not just legal requirements - they are increasingly areas where regulators are prepared to litigate.

The ACCC's statement that "markets only deliver when people trust them" frames the enforcement agenda as fundamentally connected to market function. Without trust, according to the regulator's logic, competition cannot deliver its full benefits. That framing has direct implications for how advertising itself is conducted. Misleading promotional claims do not merely harm individual consumers - they distort the competitive dynamics that make markets work.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, led by Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb, announced its 2026-27 compliance and enforcement priorities. The announcement was made at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia event in Sydney.

What: The ACCC set four headline priority areas for the year ahead - manipulative and false online practices including subscription traps and dark patterns; accurate pricing in supermarkets and essential services such as energy and telecommunications; consumer guarantees in the motor vehicle sector; and education and compliance work for businesses facing new government reforms including the merger regime, unfair trading practices laws, and the Scams Prevention Framework Act 2025.

When: The announcement was made on 19 February 2026, with the priorities applying to the 2026-27 financial year.

Where: The announcement was made at a CEDA event in Sydney, Australia. The enforcement priorities apply across the Australian market, covering domestic and international businesses operating in digital markets, retail, essential services, and motor vehicles.

Why: The priorities reflect persistent consumer complaints about cost-of-living pressures, conduct undermining trust in digital markets, and restrictions on competition. They build on five years of Digital Platform Services Inquiry findings, recent enforcement actions against major technology companies, and new government legislation requiring business education and compliance work.

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