Anticompetitive business practices in which a dominant firm may engage in order to maintain or increase its position in the market. These business practices by the firm, not without controversy, may be considered as “abusive or improper exploitation” of monopolistic control of a market aimed at restricting competition. The term abuse of dominant position has been explicitly incorporated in competition legislation of various countries such as Canada, the EU and Germany. In the United States, the counterpart provisions would be those dealing with monopoly and attempts to monopolize or monopolization of a market.
Source: OECD
Interpreting and applying Article 102 TFEU – at least in all difficult cases that typically reach the courts – requires a combined reliance on both ‘reason’ and ‘fiat’. It requires reliance on ‘reason’, by which I mean substantive reasoning about how a case should be decided, because no case is exactly like any other, and…
Tension is mounting among TV broadcasters and streaming providers as the German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office – FCO) approved the plans to award the media rights on February 26, 2024 and the DFL’s tendering process will begin shortly. However, the FCO has still not decided the associated antitrust issues, which have been hovering over the…
Introduction On 23 August 2023, the Turkish Competition Authority (“TCA”) announced that it had fined Sahibinden Bilgi Teknolojileri Pazarlama ve Ticaret A.Ş. (“Sahibinden”) for abuse of dominance and required the undertaking to implement certain remedies. The TCA decided (“Sahibinden Decision”) that Sahibinden had infringed Article 6 of Law No. 4054 on the Protection of Competition…
At the end of 2023, the Bulgarian Commission for Protection of Competition (“CPC”) issued a key decision related to an abuse of dominance case in the pharmaceutical sector. The decision, which is expected to have a significant impact on the parallel export of pharmaceuticals, provides a clue to the CPC’s approach when parallel export concerns…
On 22 September 2023, the European Commission adopted a decision imposing a fine of €376.36 million on microprocessor manufacturer Intel. This decision relates to the facts that had already been sanctioned in an earlier decision of 13 May 2009. How can this apparent inconsistency be explained? In fact, the first decision was annulled in January…
Introduction On Wednesday 25 October 2023, the General Court of the European Union ruled in Case T-136/19 on the application of the prohibition of abuse of dominance under Article 102 TFEU. The judgment concerns the annulment of a Commission decision condemning Bulgarian gas holding company BEH and subsidiaries for an unauthorised refusal of access. The…
Next 16 November 2023, the deadline for the designated gatekeepers on the 5th of September 2023 to appeal the Commission’s decisions will come to an end (for a review of the decisions, see here). Up until this moment, reporting has only documented that Apple would be considering challenging the Commission’s decisions and is prone to…
The Dutch case concerning the Apple App Store appears to make a (welcome) comeback. The case that started in 2019 came to a rather disappointing end in the summer of 2022 when the Dutch competition authority issued a public statement that gave the impression that it was satisfied with Apple’s adjustments to the App Store…
On September 25th the Lisbon Court of Appeal (TRL) upheld the essence of a 2022 ruling by the Portuguese Competition Court, which in turn had already upheld the 2019 decision of the Portuguese Competition Authority (PCAC) in the EDP case, condemning it to a fine of €40 million – the largest fine ever imposed in…
Summary of Facts On 21 September 2023 the Advocate General Juliane Kokott presented her opinion in the Case C-605/21, Heureka Group a.s. v. Google LLC. The opinion addresses a request for a preliminary ruling from the Prague Municipal Court, which is hearing Heureka’s follow-on action against Google based on the Commission’s Decision C(2017) 4444 final…
