Competition is a basic mechanism of the market economy. It improves the allocation of goods and factors of production, promotes innovation, and pushes down prices. However, there is hardly a week passing by without news from the German or European competition authorities exposing new offences...

2019 was the year of large-scale scientific reports on competition policy in the digital era.In January 2020, the German government translated these preparatory works into action and published the first fully-fledged legislative proposal for reforming competition law, tellingly dubbed the...

Both anti-corruption law and anti-trust law aim to create a level playing field and they are complementary to each other in support of this aim. Given the indispensable nature of both fields in terms of reaching social welfare, it is striking how differently society reacts to the breaching...

The rethinking of European Takeover Law is a current challenge as well as an ongoing task. The economic and political landscape has changed considerably since the Directive was enacted, and these changes have had an impact on the evaluation of takeover law with its obvious socio-economic...

This paper analyses the state of private enforcement of EU competition law in Germany after the implementation of the Competition Damages Directive 2014/104/EU. The Damages Directive provides full harmonisation, but only of select issues. In view of this fragmented legal framework, the “law in...

The ministerial proposal for a 10th amendment of the German competition law particularly addresses abuse control and seeks to tighten this pillar of competition policy against the background of the challenges from the digital economy. Next to extending the classic policy instruments of abuse...

In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as...

Nowadays, merger control predominantly relies upon a strict analysis of the effects from merger and acquisitions on effective competition. However, there is scope for so-called public interest considerations in several European merger control regimes and recently a number of European politicians...