Archive for November 2009
Lapsus
The Commission’s prosecutorial bias in official writing… I did not immediately notice, but this is undeniably a big, important, mistake.
At § 12 of its Guidance Communication on its enforcement priorities in applying Article 82 to abusive exclusionary conduct by dominant undertakings, the Commission explains the objective methodology that it will follow to assess dominance.
Read carefully:
The assessment of dominance will take into account the competitive structure of the market, and in particular the following factors: • constraints imposed by the existing supplies from, and the position on the market of, actual competitors (the market position of the dominant undertaking and its competitors);
Read again:
The assessment of dominance will take into account the competitive structure of themarket, and in particular the following factors:• constraints imposed by the existing supplies from, and the position on the market of, actual competitors (the market position of the dominant undertaking and its competitors);
In other words, the Commission pretends it will systematically review whether there is dominance, but meanwhile implies that this three stages approach is entirely redundant, because it has already reached this finding. A strong candidate for the 2009 worst antitrust law prize?
Resolution
![MCj03230910000[1]](https://chillingcompetition.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/mcj032309100001.gif "MCj03230910000[1]")
Another post related to what happened last week in Vienna. Had no time to report on this before.
As some of you may know, each year, the LIDC adopts resolutions on a competition-related issue. In so doing, the LIDC seeks to call the attention of the decision makers to certain issues of importance for the competition law community.
This year, the LIDC had chosen to deal with the issue of the competition authorities’ discretion in the context of the investigation of competition law proceedings.
Importantly, the LIDC’s resolutions are adopted pursuant to a lenghty, representative, process, which starts very early in the year at the national level: in each member state, groups of competition experts representing not only private practice, but also academics, in-house counsels and national competition officials, appoint a national reporter who is entrusted with the duty to draft a comprehensive national report. Once the national report is approved by the national group, it is sent to an international reporter who attempts to synthetise the data and to identify points of convergence/divergence amongst national jurisdictions. Where there is too much divergence or no common position, the international reporter can make spontaneous proposals on selected issues. The international report is presented at the LIDC annual conference. A large debate takes place between national groups, the international reporter and the General LIDC reporter (the person in charge of all scientific activities in the organization: this year Jean Louis Fourgoux). Eventually, this leads to the adoption of resolutions that are subsequently sent to competition enforcers.
A primer: this year’s resolutions can be found below.
Please note that next year, the conference will take place in September in Bordeaux (France). The topic is resale price maintenance and the exchange of price information through vertical relationships. The International reporter is Elisabeth Legnerfält, from the law firm DELPHI (Sweden). Nice region, nice topic and bright international reporter. A promising event.
Chillin'Competition 
