CoRe - European Competition and Regulatory Law Review

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The search returned 42 results.

Gabriele Carovano

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 2 (2018), Issue 3, Page 166 - 186

It is the overriding belief that EU competition rules should be applied uniformly, but reality shows that this is not the case. Moreover, the so-called ‘Digital Revolution’ has intensified the risk of non-homogeneous results by raising the number of multinational players, cross-border cases, and new competition issues needing a solution. This article argues that enhancing uniformity should not necessarily mean the eradication of diversity. Uniformity should instead be the result of a process able to canalise diversity. Hence, space within the system should be created where diversity can be utilised to produce better quality policies and avoid conflicting results. The article then suggests how this diversity should be co-ordinated within the European Competition Network (ECN) where the National Competition Authorities (NCAs) and the Commission share policy solutions and ideas. In particular, the article will suggest how the ECN should be modified to be able to balance the unbalanced, to transform externalities into internalities. NCAs should not only act in defence of their National interests or consumers, but should pursue one single goal: the protection of the European interests and consumers. ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un’. Keywords: European Competition Network, ECN Plus Directive, Consistency, Cooperation, Digital Single Market, National Competition Authority

Aaron L Nielson

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 2 (2018), Issue 3, Page 156 - 165

Jurisdictions around the world have been converging on a common analytical framework for merger review. Because the circumstances of proposed mergers (or combinations) are often idiosyncratic, the standards that competition authorities apply are flexible, thus providing economists with discretion to perform individualized, merger-specific analysis. Jurisdictions thus have moved away from—or declined to adopt in the first place—bright-line rules in favour of open-ended standards. This shift away from bright-line rules, however, may create a paradox: the very discretion necessary to achieve right outcomes is the cause of wrong ones. Although open-ended standards allow competition authorities to better tailor their analysis, they also empower them to act for pretextual reasons, especially in contexts for which politicized decision-making is most tempting such as the ‘online world.’ Likewise, even when a competition authority’s analysis is not pretextual, discretionary standards may make it more difficult for it to effectively rebut allegations of pretext. Hence, although doing so may introduce more imprecision into merger analysis, greater reliance on bright-line rules might nonetheless be justified. Keywords: Mergers, Discretion, Bias

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