Chillin'Competition

[Nicolas retains advertising rights on this blog, also for his publications, so he an exception to our new policy of not advertising publications and events (except the ones on which we participate…) on the home page of this blog. This change is driven by our inability to say no and by the fact that it was becoming hard to accomodate all requests. So from now on you will see a new section on the right side of the home page, just below our bios, called “Events and Publications“; we will be regularly feeding that section with interesting information that will still be visible from the home page without taking that much space. Please feel free to continue sending that info our way!]

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Nicolas has been pretty prolific lately combining interesting writings with his new focus on artificial intelligence (not kidding). He has just posted on SSRN a new paper titled “The Advocate General’s Opinion in Intel v Commission: Eight Points of Common Sense for Consideration by the CJEU“.

His contention in this interesting paper (which as you might have expected suggests the ECJ to follow AG Wahl’s Opinion) is that improvements of the law on Article 102 TFEU are within reach, without a necessity to completely revamp the case-law. Suffice is it to apply logic, first principles and common-sense, and follow the trajectory delineated by Post Danmark I and II.

Nicolas has identified the following as the key 8 ideas developed in the paper:

1.An Effects Analysis underpins Hoffman-La Roche;

2.Category and “Super-Category” Mistakes;

3.The Non Sequitur of Exclusivity =Exclusion;

4.The Non Sequitur that Any Exclusionary Effect is Anticompetitive;

5.Capability, Likelihood and Probability Standards;

6.The AEC test is a legality test, not a priority test;

7.A More Economic Approach to the Enforcement of Article 102 TFEU improves Legal Certainty, the Rule of Law and the Uniform Application of EU law;

8.A More Economic Approach does not entail more Mathematics;

To better understand what these mean, we suggest you take a look at his paper, which  can be downloaded at:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2875422