Introduction Like many competition authorities, the European Commission (“Commission”) has far-reaching powers to ask for huge amounts of information for its competition law investigations (see Council Regulation (EC) No 1/2003, Articles 18 to 21). These days it is no longer just hard copy documents being asked for, but significant amounts of electronic data in specified formats…
Recently, the Commercial Court of Moscow backed a procedural decision of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). The FAS fined the Russian IT company Mail.Ru Group for failing to provide the supervisory authority with full information about clients’ mailboxes on their servers. These mailboxes belonged to the Federal Penitentiary Service employees, who were suspected of being…
The Court order of 29 October 2020 struck by the President of the General Court in a dispute between Facebook and the European Commission is probably the first time in a while where the essence of a case against one of the Big Tech firms lies not in what those companies are (or are not)…
The issuance of requests for information (“RFIs”) within the scope of an investigation or a merger control case can be deemed one of the main tools that enables, on the one hand, a competition authority to have a better understanding of the actual market situations as well as the nature of the alleged conducts, and…
In the context of ongoing antitrust investigations into Facebook Inc.’s (‘Facebook’) data-related practices (AT.40628) and Facebook marketplace (AT.40684), on 13 March 2020 the European Commission (‘Commission’) issued two formal requests for information (‘RFIs’), requiring the company to produce a large number of internal documents. Facebook challenged the RFIs before the General Court of the European…
