Antitrust refers to a field of economic policy and laws dealing with monopoly and monopolistic practices. Antitrust law or antitrust policy are terms primarily used in the United States, while in many other countries the terms competition law or policy are used. Some countries have utilized the phrases Fair
Trading or Antimonopoly law. The intellectual basis for antitrust economics or policy is the sub-field of industrial organization economics which addresses issues arising from the behaviour of firms operating under different market structure conditions and the effect this has on economic performance. Most antitrust or competition laws have provisions dealing with structure such as mergers, monopoly, dominant market position and concentration, as well as behaviour, such as collusion, price fixing, and predatory pricing.
Source: OECD
A review of all decisions adopted pursuant to Article 81 EC/101 TFEU between the first of January 2000 and the first of January 2011 reveals that, excluding hardcore cartels, the Commission has issued altogether 18 infringement decisions and 10 commitment decisions. This is in addition to 6 negative clearance decisions and 18 exemption decisions adopted…
On 14 February, the Court of Justice will deliver a ruling on a preliminary reference by a Czech Regional Court in Brno, which is likely to provide welcome guidance on the issue of parallel proceedings within the ECN and the principle of ne bis in idem. The case concerns the legality of the Czech NCA’s…
The recent Dongfeng Nissan Case shed some interesting lights on the status of vertical restraints rules in China, three years after China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) became effective in August 2008. Currently, China’s competition law regime is still insufficiently equipped to assess and deal with vertical restraints, in spite of frequent complaints on alleged anticompetitive vertical…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has recently released two reports relating to the pharmaceutical industry. A significant theme in both reports is a concern that brand name pharmaceutical companies are using the threat of launching an authorized generic to make deals that delay generic entry. These reports shine a spotlight on the interplay between authorized…
On October 25, 2011, the Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”) fined mills company VK Mühlen AG in the amount of € 23.8 million for price fixing and customer and market allocation with competitors regarding the sale of flour in Germany. In addition, the FCO found that the participants coordinated capacity reductions. This has been the FCO’s…
On 13 September, the Commission published its decision of 31 March 2011 in China National Bluestar/Elkem. After DSM/Sinochem/JV (decision of 10 May but published in June), this was the second published decision which dealt in some detail with the question how to treat Chinese State-owned Enterprises or SOEs under the EUMR. The question has both…
The past decade has seen a flurry of articles published trying to make sense of the degree of control that the EU Courts exercise on complex economic reasoning. By contrast, much less has been written about the Courts’ unlimited jurisdiction on fines, which allows them to increase or decrease the financial sanctions imposed by the…
The European Court of Justice is expected to render its judgment in Premier League v QC Leisure in the next few months. At the heart of the case, lies the question whether licensing of intangible media content in one EU Member States exhausts the rights to that content across the EU. The answer of the…
We live in a world of network antitrust enforcement, to borrow the expression introduced by H. First a decade ago (here) to refer to the loose arrangements among the federal agencies and/or State Attorneys General offices presiding over the enforcement of federal and state antitrust laws in the US. This is increasingly the case on…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has issued a report analyzing the U.S. patent system from a competition policy perspective. The FTC recognizes that, like the competitive process fostered by competition law, the right to exclude provided by the intellectual property laws is intended to promote innovation and thereby benefit consumers. The FTC believes, however,…
