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
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,…
In its recent TeliaSonera judgment, the Court of Justice discusses whether a margin squeeze can only be abusive if the dominant company has a duty to supply the input at issue. The Court concludes that a duty to supply is not needed. The judgment, however, does not offer a clear definition of the scope for…
The case concerns the question under which conditions the possible future creation of potential competition can be considered to strengthen a dominant position under German merger control rules (see decision of December 22, 2010, VI-Kart 4/09 (V)). The FCO had prohibited a merger between two local publishers that were active in separate, but neighboring geographic…
To commemorate his first year in office as Competition Commissioner, Mr. Almunia and José openly discuss current and future competition policy issues.The full interview for World Competition is posted in Mr Almunia’s webpage http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/almunia/index_fr.htm Amongst the varied topics covered in this interview the following are worth highlighting: Fines and Damages for Competition law infringements; the…
Lawyers do funny things to words. Sometimes, of course, they need to create a technical term to cover something that doesn’t exist in ordinary parlance. “Tort” is an obvious example. Yes, you can talk about a civil wrong that has no element of contract to it but that’s a longwinded way of expressing yourself. Most…
From December 2010 to February 2011, the FCO investigated a planned settlement between the parties to a tender dispute in the public transport sector. The FCO suspected that the planned settlement would infringe the cartel prohibition (“buying competition”). The FCO issued a case report on February 25, 2011. The case illustrates that the FCO, which…
