Chillin'Competition

Pablo commented last week on the Streetmaps/Google Judgment issued a couple of weeks ago and written by Peter Roth. I thought Pablo’s points were, as always, very interesting, but I confess I had not yet read the Judgment. Now that I have, here are some of my impressions:

In spite of what many think, there are very sensible Judges out there who can do a great job dealing with complex competition law issues. The Judgment is a pleasure to read; it is comprehensive, concise, honest (e.g. “both [economic experts] have undoubted expertise in this field, but I found that each displayed a tendency to become an advocate for the party by which he was instructed” (…) “I find it somewhat surprising that there should be such a sharp clash between the experts, each with a duty to assist the court”), clear, nuanced, solidly based on precedent and evidence, very well and very transparently reasoned (which is what I expect, and often fail to get, from a Judgment); I wish EU Courts always wrote like that. Actually, I wish I wrote like that.

The issues covered in the Judgment are very similar, if not idenical, to some of the ones currently examined by the Commission; other than in our posts and in the case study I ran last year at the BSC 😉 I had never read such an accurate description of the arguments at play in the Google case.  And the Judgment goes to the crux of the issue: how to deal with conduct that is procompetitive in the market of the dominant player but that is alleged to harm competition in an adjacent one?

Mr. Roth first assesses the matter of foreclosure in the adjacent market; as explained in Pablo’s earlier post, he first explains that the likely effect should be “appreciable” (which is not an unimportant statement), and then goes on to assesses in great detail evidence and expert testimonies (which included a hot tub session), which leads him to conclude that the “appreciable effect” was not “reasonably likely”. Some may perhaps disagree with the finding, but I don’t believe anyone can criticize the detail and transparency of the reasoning.

In Roth’s words: “that is sufficient to dispose of the allegation of abuse. However, in case I should be wrong in that conclusion, and as it was extensively argued, I proceed to consider the issue of objective justification”.

And he goes on to undertake the most serious, objective and persuasive objective justification assessment I have read, thoroughly assessing possible “less restrictive alternatives”, after having importantly noted (at 149) that “the question of alternatives obviously cannot be  considered only with respect to competitive impact. Proportionality is inherently a matter of fact and degree. Where the efficiency is a technical improvement, proportionality does not require adoption of an alternative that is much less efficient in terms of greatly increased cost or which imposes an unreasonable burden”.

The bottomline: in case you had not noticed it, this one is clearly among the best written competition law Judgments I have read. 

But don’t take what I say for granted, I strongly suggest that you read it too and check it yourselves. It’s available here.