Archive for February 12th, 2013
Materials from the GCLC lunch talk on Google
Last Friday I was invited to speak on these issues at a GCLC lunch talk on “Google Search engines and competition law“. I truly enjoyed it.
I might develop the content of my presentation in a series of forthcoming posts, but today we’ll simply provide you with the presentations projected at the lunch talk.
I had the impression that the audience was a bit surprised at my rather unusual power point, which you can see here:
GCLC_Google_Lamadrid (looks better if you play the slide show; also, it’s password protected, so click “read-only”).
As I explained at the event, I decided to run the risk of projecting this ppp when I learnt that Google had pledged before the FTC not to ask for injunctions aimed at protecting its intellectual property 😉 Actually, I’m much more scared of my firm’s format-strict marketing department….
I shared the panel with Cédric Argenton (TILEC) and Anne Perrot (Mapp), both of whom did a great job. Here are their presentations: GCLC2013_Argenton & GCLC_Perrot
P.S. A necessary and fair disclosure. The power point I had in mind became real thanks to Enrique Colmenero, a terribly nice and smart guy, a techie and an entrepeneur who is now fortunately working with me on a few tech-related cases.
Revolving doors (a contrarian view)
Nico and I have come up with a way of duplicating posts out of one piece of news; one of us writes something and then the other disagrees 😉
Last Tuesday Nico wrote a post titled “Revolving doors” in which he expresses the concern that “the cumulative effect of appointing previous Commission officials as judges, plus the very many référendaires who have spent some time in the EU administration may give rise to a pro-Commission bias at the Court“.
[I was actually in Luxembourg for a Court hearing when Nico wrote it, but I’ll tell you about that some other time].
Without entering into the debate on whether there is or there isn’t too much of a pro-Commission bias at the Court (in my view, there is the same deference towards the public authority that we find in any European administrative system – in the US, on the contrary, that deference is less visible-), I don’t at all share Nico’s concern.
Assuming that there was such bias, I would argue that it has nothing to do with former Commission officials becoming members of the Court:
Only two current Judges at the GC have previously worked at the Commission: Marc van der Woude (who was also a private practitioner, which should offset any bias; ask anyone in the business their opinion on him and you won’t hear a single negative one), and Guido Berardis (also an excellent and objective Judge).
This is 2 out of 27 (3 if the Committee gives the green light to Kreuschitz, which it undoubtedly should) does not appear to be an unreasonable proportion. Furthermore, all three of them were part of the Legal Service, which means that an important aspect of their work -aside from pleading- consisted in identifying flaws in the Commission’s work.
If you ask me (and part of my job is to beat the Commission in Court), the problem lies not in Judge’s previous professional experience, but rather in Judges being appointed for political reasons other than their knowledge of the law (see here). And people who know about EU law are generally -there are a few exceptions- either academics (most of whom also have defined pro or anti Commission biases), practitioners (we may have the opposite bias, plus we’re too competition law oriented), and Commission officials.
In sum, I would argue that we need Judges that know their stuff inside out, no matter their nationality or whether they are national judges, academics, ex-Commission officials or former practitioners.
Chillin'Competition 