Chillin'Competition

Lack of recent blogging activity on my side has to do with the complexities of juggling a particularly busy period at work (currently writing from Luxembourg, again) with parenting a little man, half-training for a triathlon next Saturday (this guy tricked me…) and participating at a couple of very interesting, but not so well-timed, conference appearances. It is about the latter that I wanted to write.

On Wednesday I participated as chair/speaker at ERA’s workshop on competition law in banking and financial services in Brussels [The slides used by all speakers will be uploaded in this post asap]. As all ERA events, it was most interesting.

But on Friday I had the great privilege of being the guest lawyer (literally) at the conference organized by the Association of European Law Judges, the European Commission and Uppsala University in Sweden (pictured above). It is remarkable, and probably unparalleled in any other field, to see a very large number of judges from practically every Member State and with all sorts of different backgrounds getting together to discuss issues such as, in this occassion, multi-sided markets. As I told them, it is quite refreshing to speak at a gathering where attendees are only interested in an honest discussion about the law (and know that there is life and law beyond two provisions in a Treaty). I explained that, by contrast, many other conferences in our field are two-sided and consist of practitioners paying to be listened to by potential clients and competitors… The judges in Uppsala grasped complex stuff, exchanged ideas and were a genuinely nice group of people. I was so impressed that I thought they deserved a mention here, and so do DG Comp’s policy guys, who significantly contribute to making these events possible to the benefit of all of us working in this field. My humble contribution consisted of a tuned-for-judges version of my now stump speech on two-sided markets (my slides are available here: Lamadrid_AECLJ Uppsala

And by the way, in case you haven’t noticed, Chillin’Competition is about to reach its first million visits. Pablo and I are have some ideas on how to celebrate it, but suggestions are welcome!

P.S. Happy birthday to Pablo; as a gift, I promise him a couple of upcoming posts on more substantive stuff