McDermott’s Annual EU Competition Review summarizes key developments in EU competition rules. During the previous year, several new regulations, notices and guidelines were issued by the European Commission. There were also many interesting cases decided by the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union. All these new rules and judicial decisions may be relevant for your company and your day-to-day practice.
In our super-connected age, we can be inundated by information from numerous sources and it is difficult to select what is really relevant to one’s business. The purpose of this review is to help general counsel and their teams to be aware of the essential updates.
This review was prepared by the Firm’s European Competition Team in Brussels, Paris and Germany.
The European Commission recently reaffirmed that industrial policy objectives have no role to play when it comes to applying the EU merger control rules. Despite unusually intense industrial and political pressure to get the Siemens/Alstom railway merger done, Competition Commissioner Vestager has forcefully reiterated that the substantive test under the EU Merger Regulation remains exclusively competition based.
On 16 November 2016, the Italian Competition Authority (the “Authority”) opened a proceeding against Vodafone Italia and Telecom Italia for alleged abusive conducts in the bulk SMS market. According to the Authority, both companies would have abused their dominant position in the upstream market of SMS termination services through alleged abusive conducts aimed at excluding or limiting other competitors’ ability to compete in the downstream bulk SMS market.
According to the Authority, Vodafone Italia and Telecom Italia would have implemented a margin squeeze strategy in breach of Article 102 TFUE. In particular, the tariffs applied by Vodafone Italia and Telecom Italia in the upstream and downstream markets would leave an insufficient margin for any efficient competitor to cover their own specific costs for providing the bulk SMS service to customers, therefore preventing or restricting their access to the downstream market. The opening of the investigation follows a complaint filed with the Authority by a smaller competitor operating in the downstream bulk SMS market. The proceeding is scheduled to close on 30 November 2017.
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