As it marked the 30-year anniversary of the Single Market, the European Council asked former Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, to set out his vision for the future of the Single Market including specific proposals for its development. Letta published his report last month which, he writes, is based on 400 stakeholders’ meetings in 65…
Is competition law fit for purpose? Do we need better tools to make markets fair? How far should government go to ‘fix’ market structures? It’s impossible to attend an antitrust conference these days without discussing these questions under the umbrella of competition & industrial policy. From decades of broad consensus championing competitive neutrality and ‘letting…
The European Commission’s horizontal guidelines are an invaluable tool for practitioners in antitrust compliance work. The team at Unit A1 in DG COMP have done a great job at further developing the guidelines in the new draft that was published for stakeholder comments on 1 March 2022. Today, the EU & Competition team at Szecskay…
Sisyphus was a Greek mythological figure who was condemned to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top. Repeating this action for eternity. The quest for a clear and operational methodology for finding a restriction of competition ‘by object’ feels similar sometimes….
On January 30 2019, the Danish Competition Council (the “DCC”) found that ambulance services provider, Falck, had abused its dominant position under Article 102 TFEU. The DCC held that following a failed tender bid to the Region of Southern Denmark, the company devised a comprehensive internal and external communications’ strategy to make it difficult for…
It is almost impossible these days to attend a competition law conference without the topic of ‘Competition law in the digital era’ making up part of the agenda. In addition, enforcers are publishing policy documents on this topic at a rate that makes it a challenge to keep up for even the most diligent competition…
Antitrust enforcers are good at regularly reminding the competition law community that the various forms of abuse of dominance listed in Article 102 TFEU are not exhaustive. Indeed, the idea of what conduct falls outside “competition on the merits” is ever evolving. And this can make it difficult for practitioners to set clear lines on…
The CJEU’s judgment in MEO earlier this year seemed to be a welcome, final piece of the puzzle in the legal framework for analyzing when price discrimination is abusive. It was now relatively settled, it seemed, that for price discrimination to be an abuse of dominance, it must generally fall into one of two boxes…
The question of what constitutes a restriction of competition ‘by object’ has forever been intensely discussed and heavily litigated across the EU. As AG Kokott stated in her opinion in T-Mobile, the existence of an ‘object’ box is justified by the benefit of legal certainty and, not least, the need for conserving resources of competition…
The ink has barely dried on the DCCA’s new guidelines on joint bidding – see recent blogpost here – before a court has overturned the landmark infringement decision on which much of the guidelines are based. In its unanimous judgment containing little more than two pages of reasoning, the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court has…
