Save the date- The Ultimate Chillin’Competition Conference- 20 November 2018
The 4th Chillin’Competition Conference will take place in Brussels on 20 November 2018.
Here is what we can tell you for now:
-It took us a while to settle on a venue (because Pablo mocks my ambitions; the picture above corresponds to a real recent Whatsapp conversation regarding possible venues. His counterproposal reveals how seriously he takes me…).
-We have so far invited only one speaker, who has very kindly accepted: Commissioner Vestager will once again be our star speaker;
-The theme of the conference will be: “Concepts“. We will pick a few common but often misunderstood, or yet unclear, concepts and we will invite a group of experts to discuss their meaning and implications. It’s a bit what we did with the notion of “neutrality” in our 2nd conference, but with a broader scope. We will discuss horizontal concepts, not cases or industries.
-We are selecting the specific concepts that will be disected and your feedback would be most useful; what are the concepts that you think are in need of clarifications?
–We are open to fresh ideas and new speakers, so if you think you can astonish the competition community with a brilliant speech on any particular concept, please send us a one pager with your ideas. Depending on what we get, we might invite those with the best ideas to deliver a brief Ted-like talk (note that candidates will be selected “on the merits”; i.e. on the basis of wholly subjective and undisclosed criteria);
-Our non-business model consists in making the conference accesible to everyone by offering the service for free. If you want to be one of the sponsors that makes this possible, please shoot us a line;
-It will be, by far, the best Chilling Competition conference to date;
-Yes, yes, there will be drinks afterwards
More info on the programme, registration, etc. will follow in September…
Chillin'Competition 
I may have some questions. How can the Commission justify the notion of essential facility (as in Microsoft or Bronner) when nowadays (cf. Google search engine) a self preferencing practice, as a discrimination, can be caught under 102 TFEU? Did the Commission make, in fact, this theory quite useless and lowered the legal threshold (flowing from Magill and Microsoft I, which took into account the IP issue by the way)?
Thus, has the Commission taken a shortcut in the sense that the non-discrimination hypothesis is the part II of the “refusal to supply” practice, i.e. the FRAND access?
Frenchlawyer
31 July 2018 at 11:41 am