Turkey's Rekabet Kurulu (Competition Board) cleared Uber Technologies' acquisition of Getir's food-delivery and quick-commerce units on June 19, 2026, authorizing Uber to take sole control of two Getir Perakende Lojistik A.Ş. business lines: online food ordering and delivery, and online fast-moving consumer goods delivery. The clearance came with conditions — chiefly a commitment package under which Uber will invest a total of $500 million in Turkey, which the Board said it expects to "support high-quality employment, strengthen local engineering capabilities, and positively contribute to the development of Türkiye's digital and technology infrastructure" (Rekabet Kurumu).
What Uber Is Actually Buying
The deal, first announced in February 2026, sees Uber pay $335 million in cash for Getir's food-delivery business — which generated more than $1 billion in gross bookings in 2025, up roughly 50% year-over-year — plus $100 million for a 15% stake in Getir's grocery, retail, and water-delivery operations, with an option to acquire the rest over time (TechCrunch). Uber intends to fold the food-delivery business into Trendyol Go, the delivery platform it already controls after a 2025 deal, consolidating two of Turkey's largest local-delivery brands under one owner (Uber investor relations).
The Case for Conditioning, Not Blocking
The Board's approach deserves a fair hearing on its own terms. Turkey's food-delivery market is not abstractly competitive — it is dominated by a handful of platforms, and folding two of the largest local players into a single US-headquartered operator is exactly the kind of transaction merger control exists to scrutinize. A regulator that waved this through with no conditions at all would be open to the charge of rubber-stamping consolidation in a market that matters to millions of daily consumers and gig-economy couriers. Turkish officials can also point to a coherent industrial logic: rather than block a deal that plausibly delivers real consumer benefits — wider restaurant selection, more courier work, combined delivery networks — the Board used its leverage to lock in tangible domestic returns, including a dedicated software and technology development center funded by roughly $200 million of the total pledge (Daily Sabah). That is a defensible trade in a country actively trying to build a domestic tech workforce rather than simply exporting margin to Silicon Valley.
Why the Remedy Doesn't Match the Harm
But look at what the $500 million actually buys, and the gap becomes obvious: the commitment is an investment pledge, not a competition remedy. Classic merger control responds to concentration with structural or behavioral fixes tied to the market itself — divestitures, firewalls, non-discrimination commitments, price or commission caps for merchants and couriers who now face fewer alternatives. Turkey's Board secured none of that. Nothing in the public commitment package caps commission rates for the restaurants and grocers who now depend on a combined Trendyol Go–Getir platform to reach customers, and nothing addresses the bargaining position of couriers working for what is now the dominant local-delivery employer outside of Delivery Hero-owned Yemeksepeti. The remedy is denominated in dollars invested, not in market structure preserved.
That distinction matters because it is becoming a pattern, not a one-off. Regulators from India to Indonesia to Brussels have increasingly used merger review as a lever to extract industrial-policy concessions — local data centers, domestic hiring targets, R&D commitments — that have little to do with the specific competitive harms a deal might cause. The practice is politically popular because it produces a headline number, but it converts competition authorities into investment negotiators, a role for which they have no particular comparative advantage and which sits awkwardly against their statutory mandate to police market structure. It also privileges deep-pocketed acquirers: a well-capitalized Uber can write a $500 million check to clear political and regulatory hurdles in a way a smaller or leaner rival could never match, entrenching exactly the kind of scale advantage merger law is supposed to guard against.
The Proportionate Path Not Taken
A more proportionate approach would have paired approval with narrowly tailored, market-specific conditions — a temporary commission cap for merchants migrating off Getir, portability guarantees for courier ratings and standing across platforms, or a sunset review clause tied to actual post-merger pricing data — rather than a lump-sum investment figure that Uber would likely have found attractive on its own commercial merits regardless of the merger review. Turkey's underlying instinct, to permit consolidation that plausibly benefits consumers rather than reflexively blocking it, is the right one, and stands in useful contrast to Brussels' more blocking-prone posture toward platform mergers. But conditioning clearance on capital investment rather than competitive safeguards blurs merger review into industrial policy, and leaves the actual concentration concern — two of Turkey's three major delivery platforms now under one roof — essentially unaddressed. The Board should publish its full reasoned decision, promised for a later date, with market-share and pricing data that lets outside economists judge whether $500 million was a proxy for real remedies or a substitute for them.