For years, drivers on apps like Uber and Bolt have complained about the same thing: fares keep dropping, commissions stay high, and there is little they can do about it.
The apps set the rules through algorithms, and drivers either accept the terms or lose access to trips altogether. Some have started ignoring the app-generated price and negotiating directly with passengers instead.
READ: Survey Finds 94% of Kenyans View Ride-Hailing as Safer Than Other Transport
The government now wants to give itself the legal tools to step into that fight, and not just for ride-hailing.
A new piece of legislation called the Competition (Amendment) Bill, 2026 is currently before Parliament, and if it passes, it would change how Kenya regulates powerful digital companies across the board.
The Problem With the Old Rules
Kenya’s competition law was written with a fairly narrow idea of market power in mind: a company is powerful if it dominates a market, meaning it controls a large share of it.
That works fine for a company selling cement or beer. It works less well for a company like Uber, which does not need to dominate a market in the traditional sense to have enormous power over the people who depend on it.
A ride-hailing app can have plenty of competitors and still control a driver’s income, because switching to a rival app is not simple and rarely brings a fair alternative.
READ: Uber and Bolt Accused of Exploiting Drivers in Kenyan Court Case
The same logic applies to a vendor stuck on a dominant e-commerce marketplace, or a small business relying on an app store to reach customers.
The Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) argues that this kind of leverage, built on data, algorithms, and network effects rather than market share, has been slipping through the cracks of existing law.
Two New Legal Concepts
The Competition Bill introduces two ideas that did not exist in Kenyan law before.
The first is “strategic market position.” A company would be considered to hold one if it can influence prices, quality, service, or innovation to a meaningful degree, independently of what competitors, suppliers, or users are doing.
To decide this, the CAK would look at things like how present a company is across different digital markets, how much data it controls, how strong its network effects are, how hard it is for users to switch away, how difficult it is for new competitors to enter, and how financially strong the company is.
READ: Kenya Pushes Mandatory Local Data Storage for Ride-Hailing and Booking Apps
The second is “superior bargaining position.” This one is about unequal relationships rather than market-wide dominance.
A company would be seen as holding this kind of position if it creates an imbalance in the rights and obligations between itself and a business partner, and that partner has no real alternative to turn to.
This is the concept most directly aimed at situations like a driver stuck with an app’s commission structure, or a merchant stuck with a marketplace’s fees, even in a market that technically has competition.
Together, these two ideas move Kenyan competition law away from asking “does this company dominate the market?” and toward asking “does this company have unfair leverage over the people who depend on it?”
How the CAK Would Decide
To figure out whether a platform is acting as a gatekeeper, the Authority says it would look at a few practical questions. Does the platform sit between businesses and the customers they need to reach?
Do competitors need access to that platform just to compete at all? Does the company set the rules that everyone else in its ecosystem has to follow? And has the platform become so dominant through network effects that the market has essentially tipped in its favor?
READ: Uber Buys Out Glovo, Its Biggest Rival in Kenya’s Delivery Market
Data control is treated as a competitive asset in its own right under the proposed rules, reflecting how much of a platform’s power today comes from what it knows about its users rather than what it sells them.
Why Ride-Hailing Is the Test Case
Ride-hailing has become the clearest example of the problem the CAK is trying to solve, mostly because the tension between drivers and platforms has played out so publicly in Kenya.
Uber, Bolt and local competitors Little and Faras have been locked in a price war that has pushed fares down repeatedly. Drivers say this has eroded their earnings to the point of being unsustainable, and some have taken to refusing app-generated fares and negotiating directly with riders.
It is worth noting what the Competition Bill does not do. It does not set fare levels, and it does not force platforms to pay drivers more.
What it does is give the CAK legal grounds to investigate and act if a platform’s pricing or commission practices amount to an abuse of strategic market position or superior bargaining position.
Actual fare levels are being handled separately, through a parallel effort by the Ministry of Roads and Transport to introduce minimum compensation per trip for drivers and motorcycle operators.
What Happens If a Company Breaks the Rules?
The Competition Bill proposes real penalties for abuse of either strategic market position or superior bargaining position: a fine of up to KES 10 million, up to five years in prison, or both.
Beyond fines, the CAK would also get the power to write binding codes of practice for specific sectors where this kind of abuse is likely to happen. Once issued, companies operating in those sectors would have to follow them.
READ: Kenya Airports Authority Plans to Launch Taxi App at JKIA to Take On Uber and Bolt
The Authority says this approach is meant to let it respond quickly as new digital business models emerge, rather than having to wait for Parliament to pass new legislation every time.
Although Uber and Bolt are the most visible examples, the Bill’s language is written broadly enough to apply to digital marketplaces, food delivery apps, app stores, online advertising platforms, and any other business built around a large digital ecosystem.
Any platform that acts as a gatekeeper between businesses and their customers could eventually fall under this kind of scrutiny. This fits into a wider pattern of Kenyan regulators paying closer attention to platform businesses generally.
The Communications Authority recently created a specific Courier Hailing Service Provider license for app-based delivery companies, treating them as a distinct category rather than lumping them in with ordinary courier firms.
The Transport Ministry is separately working on driver pay and pricing rules. The Competition Bill adds a third layer focused specifically on bargaining power and market structure, rather than licensing or pay.
Kenya Is Not the First Country to Try This
The core idea behind the Competition Bill mirrors what regulators in the European Union have already been doing.
The EU has rules targeting large digital “gatekeepers,” and its competition authorities have gone after companies like Google, Apple, and Meta over practices such as favoring their own services, restricting rivals, and limiting competition inside their own platforms, resulting in penalties worth billions.
Kenya’s version is adapted to local conditions and disputes, but the core idea is the same as in larger, wealthier markets. Traditional measures of market dominance do not fully capture the level of power digital platforms can have over the businesses and workers that rely on them.
The Competition Bill is still under consideration in Parliament.
If it passes, it would be one of the biggest changes to Kenya’s competition law since digital platforms became a central part of how the economy works, and it would give the CAK tools to look well beyond ride-hailing at how digital companies use data, algorithms, and ecosystem control to shape the markets they operate in.
