Chillin'Competition

Few people read Judgments nowadays and much less cartel Judgments, in spite of these being the large majority of competition-related output on the part of EU Courts.

It is not difficult to keep track of developments in, let’s say 102, because precedents are scarce and manageable (i.e. one can easily identify any deviations in e.g. the law on refusal to deal, as there are only a handful of well-commented cases on it). But the exercise becomes practically impossible when it comes to cartels, as there are many more (lengthy and sometimes tedious) Judgments, concerning very fact-specific situations and because developments may come in various fronts (ranging from evidential issues, to parent-subsidiary relations, fining, leniency, settlements, etc).

Accordingly, in the course of the past few years in order to identify relevant developments in cartel law many people have relied on one main source of info: the yearly presentations on cartel case-law delivered by Fernando Castillo de la Torre (Commission’s Legal Service) at Les Mardis de la Concurrence a the Université Libre de Bruxelles (also repeated later internally at the Commission). I actually know of various cases where lawyers pleading before EU Courts had the slides in front of them…

The amount of work and knowledge that Fernando puts into reading and making sense out of the case law for no other reason than openly sharing the information is admirable, and perplexing if one considers that he left the Legal Service’s competition team already a few years ago.  And what borders with the paranormal is that he’s also got it all in his head and could recite by memory a large chunk of the content of the presentations, including case number and paragraph (I have actually seen that happening in Court).

The problem with those presentations was that, until now, they only were available in the gray market; one needed to know somebody who knew somebody who had registered for the talk and had received the materials.

In order to address this market failure, we have asked Fernando whether we could make available the presentations from the past few years, and he didn’t hesitate to accept.

Here they are:

Castillo Cartels 2009

Castillo Cartels 2010- 2011

Castillo Cartels 2012

Castillo Cartels 2013

Castillo Cartels 2014

Castillo Cartels 2015

Castillo Cartels 2016

Next Friday (11 March) the XIX edition of the “Curso de Derecho de la Competencia” that Luis Ortiz Blanco and I direct in Madrid will come to a close with a seminar on competition advocacy, compliance and self-assessments.

The line-up of speakers, this time mainly public officials and in-house lawyers, is  once again unbeatable, thanks to the work of Juan Andrés García Alonso.

Speakers include:
Cecilio Madero (Deputy Director General, DG Comp) Antonio Maudes Gutiérrez (CNMC), María Sobrino Ruiz (CNMC), Mark Rollinger (General Counsel, Peugeot), Paolo Palmigiano (General Counsel EMA, Sumitomo Electric Industries), Jorge Viera (Herbert Smith), Carlos Pascual (KPMG) Steve Leroy (Vice President Legal, AB InBev), Juan José Gisbert-Gutiérrez (Michelin) and Juan Andrés García Alonso (Grupo
PSA).

More information is available here: IEB 2016 – Seminar IV – Advocacy, compliance and self assessments

I am back in London after a mini-tour in Spain (Madrid and Valencia), where I gave a presentation on Copyright, Competition, and the Digital Single Market, which can be found here. The presentation focuses on the online/geo-blocking aspects of the Cross-Border Pay TV case (in line with the broad theme of the two events). It reflects the views I have been expressing on the blog in the last couple of years, which means that there is little point in going over them again.

I will just mention that theCross-Border Pay TV case is intriguing for an academic. My impression is that, like other recent decisions, the case hints at a new balance between competition law and intellectual property. This is a theme that I have discussed abundantly with my LLM students this term and is also one of the topics of a book on which I am working.

And I should also point out that – shame on me – it was my first time in Valencia. I enjoyed the city, but more so the genuine certified 100% Paella Valenciana at Casa Roberto after the conference!

The German Competition Authority announced this morning that it has opened an abuse of dominance investigation on Facebook “on suspicion of having abused its market power by infringing data protection rules”.

According to its Press Release, the theory of harm is that Facebook may have exploited its arguable dominant position in “the market for social networks” by adopting terms of service on the use of user data “in violation of data protection provisions”.

In order for users to access the social network, users must accept Facebook’s terms of service. To me, this sounds perfectly normal, but the press release underlines that “there is considerable doubt as to the admissibility of this procedure, in particular under applicable national data protection law”. But the authority’s preliminary reasoning seems to be that users would not accept those terms of service should the company enjoy a lesser degree of market power.

The President of the Bundeskartellamt has stated that “Dominant companies are subject to special obligations. These include the use of adequate terms of service as far as these are relevant to the market (….) it is essential to also examine under the aspect of abuse of market power whether the consumers are sufficiently informed about the type and extent of data collected.”

This is a first, and it is a relevant one. A few comments off the top of my head:

-Wasn’t this clear already? This development fits, as you know, within a trend to try to squeeze privacy considerations into the realm of competition law. This is something that we have discussed abundantly (see e.g. here or here) and that I, for one, think has been appropriately settled by both the ECJ (Asnef Equifax, para 63 “any possible issues relating to the sensitivity of personal data are not, as such, a matter for competition law, they may be resolved on the basis of the relevant provisions governing data protection”) and the Commission decisions in Google/DoubleClick or Facebook/Whatsapp (para. 164: “privacy-related concerns flowing from the increased concentration of data within the control of Facebook as a result of the Transaction do not fall within the scope of the EU competition law rules but within the scope of the EU data protection rules.”)

-The ever growing responsibility of the dominant firm. It also is part of another tendency, that of extending the “special responsibility” of the dominant firm in order to comply with the law, and not just with competition law, with literally any legal provision. We have discussed this in the past too, in relation to the ECJ’s Judgment in Astra Zeneca (see here) as well as with the “scraping” allegations levied against Google (see here).

-Isn’t the imposition of “unfair trading conditions” expressly mentioned in Article 102. a)?  It is. And it is also widely acknowledged that privacy can be one parameter of competition. So, admittedly, and theoretically, the Bundeskartellamt could build an exploitative case alleging that Facebook sets infra-competitive privacy terms and conditions. However, this does not seem to the reasoning underlying the investigation. Perhaps this has to do with the difficulties in determining which is the “competitive” level of privacy. If it is difficult to determine when a price is ‘excessive’, imagine when it comes to this question. This line of analysis does not sound to be a particularly promising one (without having spent a fortune in expert analysis I suspect that plenty of services with much less market power than Facebook have much lower privacy standards….). Possibly in the light of these difficulties the authority is prepared to take a shortcut, automatically equating an alleged “violation of data protection provisions” by a dominant company with an abuse of dominance.

-Omniscient and omnipotent competition authorities. So essentially, this investigation sends the message that competition authorities can now police any breach of the law by dominant companies. Competition authorities should therefore be not only experts in competition, but in any other branch of the law?  Good luck with that. This may give the Commission equally absurd ideas; it could, for instance, now challenge tax advantages alleging that those were only received because of the economic pre-eminence of some companies….

-If the conduct already breaches other rules, why bother with competition law? Competition authorities have scarce resources. If it is already a given that a conduct breaches other provisions (this seems to be the premise to the investigation), then why bother doing through the hurdles of a 102 case?

 –The challenges of establishing dominance in the face of unhelpful precedents. Leaving wider issues aside, and moving on to dominance, the case seems to be premised on the arguable dominance of Facebook. But, in the light, among others, of the General Court’s Judgment in Case T-79/12 and of the Commission’s decision in Facebook/Whatsapp, the German authority seems poised to have a tough time. Those precedents make it clear that dominance in these markets may be very hard to establish, particularly since social networks are very dynamic, services are provided for free, the role of network effects is mitigated, there are no economic or technical barriers for users to switch, etc. (for my comment on Case T-79/12, see here). [It would also be interesting to see the assessment of the competitive constraints posed by others in these markets (e.g. Google was considered to exert strong pressures in MSFT/Skype despite its 0-5% market share -decision, paras 124 et seq, and para 70 of the Judgment.- )].

-On the connection (or lack thereof) between dominance and the abuse. The Press Release does actually say –or suggest- something which is arguably sensible (albeit contrary to Continental Can and Astra Zeneca) when explaining that it needs to check whether there is “a connection between such an infringement and market dominance”.

 –Wrongly paternalistic competition law? When commenting on the debate on digital platforms (the video of my intervention at the European Parliament is now available here) and on the antitrust/privacy interface, I have always said that in the face of privacy-related concerns what public authorities should do is make sure consumers are in a position to make informed choices. Competition law is there to preserve choices, and here consumers have it. Facebook is not an unavoidable trading partner and consumers are not locked in to it; if consumers don’t think it’s worth giving data in exchange for the service, they won’t join. There may be a market failure, but one that has to do with asymmetries of information, not market power. In other words, whether consumers know or not what terms and conditions they are accepting may be a public policy issue, but one that, in my humble view, is not for competition law to address.

P.S. I was supposed to be discussing this precise topic on Saturday at this AIJA conference on media and technology, but I have had to ask my colleague Sam Villiers to replace me. Chillin’Competiiton will nonetheless be represented by Pablo.

On Friday (4 March) Pablo and I will be coordinating a seminar on competition law in media and technology focused on access to digital content and on the legal issues surrounding open and closed systems. The seminar is part of the wider IEB Course. The programme is the following:

16.00-17.50: Access to digital content and competition law

Ben Van Rompuy  (Senior Researcher , T.M.C. Asser Instituut)

Alexandre de Streel (Professor of European Law, University of Namur; Director, Research
Centre for Information, Law and Society)

Pablo Ibanez Colomo (Associate Professor, London School of Economics; star of the viral Youtube video “Running in [he doesn’t let me say more….]”)

Chair: Jesús Alfaro (Professor, Universidad Autónoma; Counsel, Linklaters)

18.00-19.30 Open and closed systems under competition law

Sebastian Lecou (Economist, Autorité de la Concurrence)

Andrew Leyden (Associate, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton)

Juan Delgado (Director, Global Economics Group)

Chair: myself

For more info, click here: Programa IEB 2016 – Seminario III – Competition Law in the Technology Se…  or drop me a line at alfonso.lamadrid@garrigues.com

This is my fourth post of the day on interesting highlights that we should have covered. It only makes sense that it deals with exhaustion…

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If interested in patent issues related to antitrust you should pay attention to a decision issued a few days ago by the U.S. Federal Circuit in Lexmark v Impression products on patent exhaustion/ “first sale” doctrine (interestingly holding that the Supreme Court’s decision in Quanta, among others, had not overruled the Federal Circuit’s earlier decisions on the effect of foreign and conditional sales; for interesting amicus curiae from the AAI and others defending the opposite, see here). Its potential antitrust implications are significant. For interesting discussions on the case (I’ve ran out of blogging time by now), see here, here or here.

[Sponsored Ad: if interested about the antitrust/patent interface, then do attend the LCII conference on patent- hold up next week  organized by Nicolas Petit, who is currently doing quite a lot of patent-related work; see here for his latest paper]

And now that I mention IP and exhaustion I realize we never discussed on the blog the very interesting issues at stake in the Commission’s investigation into geo-blocking arrangements in the Sky-Hollywood Studios/ Pay-TV investigation in which I am representing the UK’s independent producers (the oral hearing took place last month).

Without disclosing anything I should not, let me just anticipate (or rather, bet) that exhaustion –or rather, non-exhaustion, will be the key to that case.

Pablo commented last week on the Streetmaps/Google Judgment issued a couple of weeks ago and written by Peter Roth. I thought Pablo’s points were, as always, very interesting, but I confess I had not yet read the Judgment. Now that I have, here are some of my impressions:

In spite of what many think, there are very sensible Judges out there who can do a great job dealing with complex competition law issues. The Judgment is a pleasure to read; it is comprehensive, concise, honest (e.g. “both [economic experts] have undoubted expertise in this field, but I found that each displayed a tendency to become an advocate for the party by which he was instructed” (…) “I find it somewhat surprising that there should be such a sharp clash between the experts, each with a duty to assist the court”), clear, nuanced, solidly based on precedent and evidence, very well and very transparently reasoned (which is what I expect, and often fail to get, from a Judgment); I wish EU Courts always wrote like that. Actually, I wish I wrote like that.

The issues covered in the Judgment are very similar, if not idenical, to some of the ones currently examined by the Commission; other than in our posts and in the case study I ran last year at the BSC 😉 I had never read such an accurate description of the arguments at play in the Google case.  And the Judgment goes to the crux of the issue: how to deal with conduct that is procompetitive in the market of the dominant player but that is alleged to harm competition in an adjacent one?

Mr. Roth first assesses the matter of foreclosure in the adjacent market; as explained in Pablo’s earlier post, he first explains that the likely effect should be “appreciable” (which is not an unimportant statement), and then goes on to assesses in great detail evidence and expert testimonies (which included a hot tub session), which leads him to conclude that the “appreciable effect” was not “reasonably likely”. Some may perhaps disagree with the finding, but I don’t believe anyone can criticize the detail and transparency of the reasoning.

In Roth’s words: “that is sufficient to dispose of the allegation of abuse. However, in case I should be wrong in that conclusion, and as it was extensively argued, I proceed to consider the issue of objective justification”.

And he goes on to undertake the most serious, objective and persuasive objective justification assessment I have read, thoroughly assessing possible “less restrictive alternatives”, after having importantly noted (at 149) that “the question of alternatives obviously cannot be  considered only with respect to competitive impact. Proportionality is inherently a matter of fact and degree. Where the efficiency is a technical improvement, proportionality does not require adoption of an alternative that is much less efficient in terms of greatly increased cost or which imposes an unreasonable burden”.

The bottomline: in case you had not noticed it, this one is clearly among the best written competition law Judgments I have read. 

But don’t take what I say for granted, I strongly suggest that you read it too and check it yourselves. It’s available here.

This is today’s second post on interesting highlights that we had not yet covered. In this one I will very briefly deal State aid cases decided at the end of 2015.

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In my previous post I referred to a case in which the Commision got an arguably unnecessary blow.  A stream of cases where the Commission got away with something surprising is that related to the digital switchover in Spain decided on November 26th (disclosure: we represent several companies and public entities in those cases). For a comment in the State Aid Hub, see here.

The whole case boils down to the Commission and the General Court agreeing that ensuring that the TV signal reaches the 2,5% of Spanish citizens living in “remote and less urbanized areas” (to quote the decision’s title) otherwise not covered by the market (the market failure uncontested) is not a Service of General Economic Interest. So much for Protocol 26, for the Commission’s lip service to SGEIs, and also for Member State’s ability to choose how to provide a SGEI (which is now conditioned to “technologic neutrality”).  The case is also interesting when compared to others in which the Commission acknowledges, for instance, that ensuring broadband access in Paris is a SGEI…

It is noteworthy that in its Press Release the Court did not refer to the areas/population affected by the measures (I insist, the 2,5% of population living in remote and less urbanized areas).

There is much more to be said about these cases, but I will comment again on these cases once we have won the 4 ECJ appeals lodged a few days ago 😉

***

We nonetheless fared better in another State aid case related to the so-called “tax lease” (disclosure, in that saga of cases we are also representing the applicants/investors in 22 pending cases before the General Court against the same decision). The Judgment of the General Court of December 17^th in the pilot case concerning the appeal by the Kingdom of Spain confirms the theory of selectivity with which we previously won the “Spanish financial goodwill cases” and pursuant to which investors should not have been identified as the beneficiaries of the alleged aid (for our comment on that one, see here).

The Judgment does a very good job explaining why that theory not only is perfectly sensible, but also that it was always there regardless of the Santander/Autogrill Judgments (read, in particular paras. 143 to 180). In the Court’s view, the decision’s error regarding selectivity also contaminates its conclusions regarding the distortion of competition and the effect on inter-state trade.

The Commission is likely to appeal, if only because of the spill-over effects this could have in its recent tax-ruling investigations. So, again, we’ll be able to say more once the ECJ Judgments are out. By the way, the many cases pending before the General Court raise a number of other most interesting issues (e.g. can a State aid decision declare private contracts void?), so keep an eye open for those too.

[Sponsored Ad: we will be lecturing on State aid litigation next week in a 3 day State aid seminar taking place in Madrid; see here: IEB State aid Seminar 2016

P.S. By the way, the last three cases to which I have referred were all adopted under Commissioner Almunia (in the case of the financial goodwill, only the third decision, issued just days before the annulment; the previous two were adopted under Kroes), all targeted Spain, two of them were annulled and the other –although endorsed by the General Court- is, without exaggeration, the worst I have ever seen in my experience. The fact that these decisions adopted under his mandate were all unfounded clearly shows that the criticism according to which Almunia would have favored Spanish companies is also unfounded.

We never said a word about the annulment, back in December, of the Commission’s airfreight decision.

I worked on that case before the Commission (for an addressee of the SO later not included in the decision) and shortly before the Judgment went out I was asked by Nicholas Hirst (Politico) whether I thought the decision could be annulled. I confess I didn’t think it was possible, that it was a solid one, not the least because there were 14 leniency applicants. And then the General Court annulled it.

But the real surprise came not with the news, but when reading the Judgment(s). Some people tend to think that a Judgment that quashes a Commission decision must necessarily be a good thing, because after all strict judicial review is a good thing. If you ask me, and to put it mildly, the Judgments don’t make sense (and I bet that a few of the winning lawyers share this view).

The only reason why the decision is annulled is because the Court sees incongruence between the grounds and the dispositive parts. The grounds were –like it or not- clear, and the alleged problem was that when imposing fines –in the operative part- the Commission distinguished, the periods for which it had the power to impose those fines (in the air transport world the Commission’s powers changed over time).

To me, the content of the decision was perfectly clear. How that can be a problem liable of leading to the decision’s annulment is beyond me. In any event, this might not be of much, or any, practical significance, as the Commission can easily amend the supposed error in a new decision. The Commission does get it wrong sometimes (for an example of this, check out my next post on recent State aid cases), but the fact that it got the blow in a case where it might not have deserved it is a bit puzzling.

Other recent relevant cartel cases involve leniency issues (namely the ECJ’s Judgments in DHL and Galp), but we’ll leave that for a future post.

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On Friday last week, the High Court of England and Wales ruled on the dispute between Streetmap and Google (see here). It is a really interesting read, and one that shows that – whether or not one agrees with the outcome – courts can deal effectively with complex competition law matters (I am told that I should not jump to conclusions too readily: apparently Mr Justice Roth, author of the decision, is an active member of the Association of European Competition Law Judges and attended in that capacity the seminal lecture on two-sided markets that Alfonso gave in Uppsala 😉 ).

The obvious appeal of Streetmap v Google is that it raises pretty much the same issues that the Commission will have to address in its own – and pending – Google case (see here and here). In essence, Streetmap argued that Google’s prominent presentation of its mapping services amounted to an abuse of a dominant position. As many people have argued, the combination of Google Maps and the search results is a form of abusive ‘bundling’.

Mr Justice Roth did not seem very impressed with the arguments brought by Streetmap. He concluded that Google’s practice was not reasonably likely to have an appreciable anticompetitive effect and that, in any event, it was objectively justified. I, on the other hand, am very impressed with the decision. Mr Justice Roth’s analysis is penetrating and creative. Here and there, I have found arguments about which I had not thought before.

The decision provides particularly interesting lessons for Google and other ongoing Article 102 TFEU cases. I can think of the following:

• Effects need to be showed for some practices, not simply assumed. Post Danmark II made it clear that, as far as some practices are concerned, a likely anticompetitive effect must be shown. In such cases, assuming that the practice is capable of having such an effect is not enough. It would be necessary to examine the features of the relevant market and how, in that context, the practice would lead to foreclosure. Mr Justice Roth applies this principle and concludes – rightly in my view – that Google’s conduct is a ‘by effect’ practice.

• There must be a causal link between the abuse and the anticompetitive effect. This is one of the fundamental aspects of the ongoing Google case, and one that is often ignored. In fast-moving markets, the exclusion of rivals is not necessarily the consequence of an abusive practice. Rivals may not be able to adapt to changes in consumer demand. Their business model may be the relic of a past era. As a result, they would have been driven out of the market irrespective of the behaviour of the dominant firm (the counterfactual, again!).
  Post Danmark II was clear in stating that a ‘by effect’ practice is only contrary to Article 102 TFEU where the ‘anti-competitive effects’ are ‘attributable’ to the dominant firm (para 47, emphasis added). Mr Justice Roth applies this principle and appears to take the view that Streetmap’s decline is not attributable to Google’s practice. He seems to suggest that it would have happened anyway.
  The Commission faces a major challenge in this regard in the pending Google case. Assuming there has been a decline in the traffic towards some price comparison websites, the Commission would have to show, to the requisite legal standard, that this is the consequence of Google’s practices – as opposed to the consequence of the evolution of markets and, in particular, the rise of Amazon, eBay and others.

• There is confusion about the legal test that should apply to Google. Unsurprisingly, Streetmap argued that Google’s practice was a form of bundling. This position is controversial (see here). These days, consumers expect more than the proverbial ten blue links when they perform a search on Google. Consumers’ assumption is that, where relevant, other affiliated services (including maps, images and youtube videos) will also be displayed.
  Is it possible to argue, against this background, that Google’s practice is a form of abusive bundling and/or that the practice is not objectively justified? The Commission conceded in its Guidance that two products are distinct only where ‘a substantial number of customers would purchase or would have purchased the tying product without also buying the tied product from the same supplier’.
  Where, conversely, consumers would only obtain the tying product with the tied product, the practice is most probably objectively justified and as such a source of efficiency gains that benefits consumers.
  Will the Commission depart from the Guidance in Google? What are the implications? Nicolas Petit has recently written an interesting paper on the impact of the Guidance on administrative discretion. The conclusion that would follow logically from Nico’s paper is that the Commission cannot depart from the approach to tying and bundling sketched in the document. I have written elsewhere that the Guidance is a pre-commitment device – a promise to act in a certain way – that cannot simply be disregarded.

• The rejection of the de minimis doctrine does not mean that it is not necessary to show an effect. In Post Danmark II, the Court of Justice refused to set a de minimis threshold. Some people interpreted this passage of the ruling as meaning that there is no need to show an anticompetitive effect in the context of Article 102 TFEU. This position is not correct, as I explained elsewhere. What the Court held in Post Danmark II is that, where an anticompetitive effect is shown, this effect will be appreciable. In any event, the anti-competitive effect – and the causal link between the practice and the effect – will have to be established, and not simply assumed.
  Mr Justice Roth adds an interesting twist to this question. He claims that the conclusion of the Court in Post Danmark II is only valid where the abuse and the exclusionary effects take place on the same market. In the case of leveraging, it would be necessary to show that the anticompetitive effects on the non-dominated markets are appreciable. Not everybody will agree with this position, but the underlying reasoning and approach are, in my view, correct.