This paper aims at highlighting the Commission's approach towards the relation between sector specific regulation and general competition law, especially concerning energy markets and the road to Internal Market objective.We firstly present Trinko case, in order to focus on two crucial and...

We briefly review the relevant economic theories and legal treatment of vertical restraints, and especially focus on the 1977 landmark case of Sylvania and its possible influence on China's antitrust enforcement on vertical restraints. China's competition policy, and particularly its...

The European Commission (EC) and the European Courts have being reaffirming in the Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica cases that guide-prices established by sector regulators upon electronic communications incumbents cannot per se exclude that conducts with anticompetitive foreclosure effects,...

The EC antitrust prohibitions are regularly invoked in private litigation as a shield. Private parties also play an important role in public antitrust enforcement through complaints to the competition authorities. However, in marked contrast with the situation in the US, private actions for...

This paper discusses discretion and prioritisation in public antitrust enforcement, in particular in the enforcement of EU antitrust law. First, the paper defines the notion of discretion and discusses the rationale of discretion. Second, it examines the enforcement of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU...

Should companies that have antitrust compliance programmes be granted a reduction in the amount of fines or even immunity from fines when they are found to have committed antitrust infringements? Should the absence of a compliance programme constitute an aggravating factor leading to higher...

Following the Jussila and Menarini judgments, it is now entirely clear that Article 6 ECHR, as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights, provides no grounds for abandoning the system in which the European Commission both investigates suspected infringements of the EU antitrust...

A substantial number of cartels in the European Union are detected and enforced by the national competition authorities (NCAs). The effectiveness of domestic enforcement has been subject to extensive review and debates, which have recently culminated and resulted in the proposal for the ECN+...

The aim of this paper is to describe in detail a set of newly developed indicators of the quality of competition policy, Competition Policy Indexes, or CPIs. The CPIs measure the deterrence properties of a competition policy in a jurisdiction, where for competition policy we mean the antitrust...