General Court of the European Union

Data protection, Designation Decision, Digital, Digital competition, Digital economy, Digital markets, Digital Markets Act, European Commission, General Court of the European Union, Interim measures, Interim relief

(University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain)/ /Leave a comment

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has not managed to suspend the effects of the European Commission’s designation decision (for comment on the designation decisions, see here). However, the appeal that ByteDance directed at the designation decision will be given the benefit of an expedited procedure. This is the first time that the General Court uttered a…

Digital competition, Digital economy, Digital markets, Digital Markets Act, General Court of the European Union, Interim measures, Interim relief

(University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain)/ /Leave a comment

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is currently bluffing before the EU Courts in the face of its gatekeeper designation decision issued by the Commission last September (the Decision). On 15 November 2023, ByteDance confirmed that it was appealing the Decision before the General Court, and a couple of days after that, the Court of Justice acknowledged…

European Commission, European Court of Justice, General Court of the European Union, Gun jumping, Merger control, Merger notification, Merger regulation, Merger Thresholds, Mergers

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On 9 November 2023, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) confirmed that the European Commission (EC) was right to impose two separate fines on Altice for breaching standstill rules and failing to notify its acquisition of PT Portugal, but lowered the fine for failure to notify by €3.1 million. The European Union (EU) merger control…

Abuse of dominance, Advantage, Bulgaria, Burden of Proof, Competition, Competition enforcement, Competition law, Competition policy, Complaint, Discrimination, Dominance, General Court of the European Union, Potential competition

(KU Leuven)/ /Leave a comment

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…

Abuse of dominance, Apple, Digital competition, Digital economy, Digital markets, Digital Markets Act, General Court of the European Union

(University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain)/ /Leave a comment

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…

Advertising, Amazon, Digital competition, Digital economy, Digital Services Act, General Court of the European Union, Interim relief

(Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences)/ /Leave a comment

On September 27, 2023, the European General Court (GC or the Court), for the first time, issued a decision related to the new set of rules for the digital space introduced by the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Case Amazon v Commission, T-367/23 R. The Court granted Amazon interim measures concerning the application of the…

Amazon, General Court of the European Union, Investigations, Request for information (RFI)

, (Mayer Brown)/ /Leave a comment

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…

Abuse of dominance, Advocate General, European Court of Justice, Four-to-three Merger, General Court of the European Union, Guidelines, Horizontal, Judicial review, Merger control, Merger notification, Merger Thresholds

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Advocate General Kokott has found [1] that the General Court erred in law in requiring the European Commission to show anti-competitive effects of a merger with “strong probability” and that the scope of its judicial review was overly broad, notably in relation to economic evidence.   Key takeaways This case will give the Court of…

Abuse of dominance, Advantage, Anticompetitive agreements, As Efficient Competitor, Burden of Proof, European Commission, Fines, General Court of the European Union, Google, Market definition, Tying and Bundling

(University of Mannheim)/ /Leave a comment

The long-awaited Google Android decision is out (see the press release here or the full text here). The General Court has dismissed Google’s action almost in its entirety, slightly reducing the record fine from 4.343 billion euros to (still a record) 4.125 billion euros. This post gives a very first overview of the judgment and…

Dutch clause, European Commission, General Court of the European Union, Gun jumping, Killer acquisitions, Merger control

(Norton Rose Fulbright, Belgium)/ /Leave a comment

On September 6, 2022, the European Commission (Commission) announced that it had prohibited the acquisition by Illumina Inc., a U.S company supplying sequencing- and array-based solutions for genetic and genomic analysis, of Grail LLC, another U.S. company that develops blood tests for the early detection of cancers, under the EU Merger Regulation (EUMR).  Grail has…