Chillin'Competition

Writing about the Intel Judgment seems to have become one of the favorite hobbies of some of our leading competition law experts.

One of the most downloaded and talked-about competition law articles of the year was Wouter Wils‘ one on “The Judgment of the EU General Court in Intel and the So-Called “More Economic Approach” to Abuse of Dominance“, which we discussed and first announced here.

Wouter’s piece was followed by other equally interesting ones, like Richard Whish‘s (see here), and like my current co-blogger’s, which also received considerable attention (see here for Pablo Ibañez‘s “Intel and Article 102 TFEU Case Law: Making Sense of a Perpetual Controversy”  [Wouter’s and Pablo’s articles are by the way both nominated for the Antitrust Writing Awards (see the “Dominance” category here); for some reason Pablo is also co-nominated in the business category for two other pieces I wrote myself (I now understand why he likes to theorize about free riding… 😉 ]

The latest addition to this list of worthy reading is a paper just made available by our friend and founder of this blog, Nicolas Petit. His piece, titled, Intel, Leveraging Rebates and the Goals of Article 102 TFEU discusses the positive law standard  applicable to exclusivity rebates following Intel. He finds that the GC’s Judgment sets a modified per se prohibition rule for exclusivity rebates, and endorses the theory of anticompetitive leveraging that formed the core of the Commission’s Guidance Paper on Article 102 TFEU. Nicolas also discusses the purposivist debate that has arisen in the scholarship, and whether it is right that the General Court endorsed a non-welfarist approach to Article 102 TFEU. In his view, this cannot be right, for non welfarist goals cannot be acclimated in moden competition law. Nicolas calls for clear dicta from the ECJ along the lines of Post Danmark.

Those interested in knowing even more (or, rather, in having even more mixed views) about the Intel case should (1) have attended Nick Banasevic’s (who was Case Manager in Intel) excellent talk about the Judgment last Friday in Madrid; and (2) take a look at a new competition law journal (Competition Law & Policy Debate) which, in its first number, features a bunch of Intel-related articles authored by a very impressive line-up of authors (the same issue includes as well an interesting piece on the Google case by the former President of the CFI, Bo Vesterdorf, also available in SSRN).

P.S. Following the publication of this post I have received another piece on the Judgment. This one is authored by Luc Peeperkorn -a European Commission official and one of the main proponents of the effects-based approach, currently on a one-year leave of absence at NYU-, and its title is self-explanatory: “Why the General Court is wrong in Intel and what the Court of Justice can do to rebalance the assessment of rebates“. The piece is also interesting, and unusual, for it is not every day that a Commission official criticizes (although in an academic capacity) a Judgment that the Institution won in first instance and is defending on appeal.