Chillin'Competition

The 2nd Chillin’Competition conference took place yesterday; we very much enjoyed it and we hope all attendees and speakers did too. Once again, our gratitude goes to Commissioner Vestager, to Judge Forrester and to all other speakers; thanks to them we were able to have a deep but fun discussion about key issues arising in our discipline. Thanks also to our sponsors for having made possible a certain disruption of the conference market.

It’s not for us to evaluate the result of the conference, but it met our very own expectations. Any of you who attended is very welcome to write a review/suggestions/criticism as comments on this post. Next time, we warn you, we truly plan on changing competition law conferences as you know them; we may have been a bit too conservative this time. We have just received some excellent ideas from John Fingleton; if you have your own, please shoot them our way.

It was also great to meet a bunch of the readers of this blog [btw, the code word that we all used at the bar for the free drinks (“elephant”) does not work anymore; if you try it now people may look at you weirdly 😉 ]

In the course of the week we will be uploading some videos and pictures of the conference. For the time being, here are the presentations used by Pablo, Bill Batchelor, José Luis Buendía, Jorge Padilla and Scott McInnes:

chillin-competition_neutrality-everywhere_pablo-ibanez-colomo

chillin-competition_neutrality-in-distribution-batchelor

chillin-competition_neutrality-and-public-competition-law-jl-buendia

chillincompetition_neutrality-and-payments_mcinnes

chillincompetition_neutrality-in-distribution-j-padilla

A short selective summary of the event drafted by our friends at Gecic Law is also available here.

P.S. Some people have inquired about the use of the Swiss flag in the conference programme. As I explained in my introductory speech, the truth is that we did ask the Swiss embassy whether they had objections to us using their flag to illustrate the concept of neutrality, but they of course said they had no views one way or the other…