On June 23, 2023, amendments to the Canadian Competition Act (Act) took effect which now make it a per se criminal offence for unaffiliated employers to agree, conspire or arrange to: “Fix, maintain, decrease or control salaries, wages or terms and conditions of employment” (wage-fixing agreements); or “Not solicit or hire each other’s employees” (no-poach/non-solicit…
The EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) gives the European Commission (the Commission) broad powers to investigate and remedy distortions of the European Union (EU) internal market caused by non-EU subsidies and subjects significant acquisitions and public tenders to a new EU notification and approval regime. The Commission’s publication of an implementing regulation (the Implementing Regulation)…
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…
On July 6, 2023, the German parliament adopted the “Competition Enforcement Act.” The new law still lacks final approval by the Bundesrat, which will not be granted before the end of September, but this is only a formality. It marks the 11th amendment to the Act against Restraints on Competition (ARC11), Germany’s national antitrust law….
On 1 June 2023, the European Commission published its new Horizontal Cooperation Guidelines (HCG) with a view to providing improved guidance for competitors wishing to cooperate, including in areas not previously covered in the 2012 HCG. One such new area is specific to the telecommunications sector and covers network sharing agreements (NSAs). This analysis sets…
Three years after the introduction of Spain’s FDI General Screening Mechanism (in 2020), Spain has finally approved its FDI Implementing Regulation (for the entire text, unfortunately only available in Spanish, please click here). Although many of the rules now in force could be found in drafts made available by the Ministry for Industry, Commerce and…
Introduction Three weeks ago, the Spanish Supreme Court delivered its first rulings on damages claims in the trucks cartel. Given that Spanish courts have been the most active in the EU on this case (see the stream of judgments issued by the Courts of Appeal in Figure 1, 85% are available at CENDOJ), there was…
On 4 July 2023, the Court of Justice resolved the conundrum around the potential interaction between data protection regulation and competition law following the legal opera that started in 2019 with the German competition authority’s case against Facebook/Meta’s processing activities (for a summary of the case, see here). The ruling hops onto Advocate General Rantos’…
In a recent judgment of 31 May 2023, the Amsterdam District Court (the District Court) accepted jurisdiction to adjudicate a damages case against Google Netherlands B.V. (located in Amsterdam) as well as against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc., two US-based entities that were fined by the European Commission in the Google Shopping case for abuse…
The European Commission (“EC”) has published its final revised Horizontal Cooperation Guidelines and adopted new R&D and Specialisation Block Exemption Regulations (HBERs). The EC’s aim is to provide more guidance for competitors wishing to cooperate in areas such as R&D and production, but also in sustainability initiatives. What are the EU rules on horizontal…
