At the end of 2018, the European Parliament and Council adopted Directive (EU) 2019/1, often referred to as the 'ECN+ Directive', which, among other things, contains provisions ensuring the independence of the competition authorities of the EU Member States (national competition authorities or...

This contribution investigates the form and content of a new and updated European Union (EU) legal framework intended to regulate third-country import pipelines for gas, including the ‘upstream' component of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The article will first set the scene and examine the...

Competitors embroiled in a patent dispute always prefer to preserve and share monopoly profits, even if the patent is likely invalid. Antitrust has come to embrace a policy that requires horizontal settlements to be "proportional" in the sense that their anticompetitive effects are commensurate...

The most pressing debates in antitrust today center on major platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Platform markets are subject to strong network effects, which tend to create barriers to entry and reinforce market power. Frequently, the only way for a new platform to enter the market...

The platform economy is subject to increasingly intense competition law enforcement. One part of the platform economy — the peer-to-peer (P2P) economy — has so far largely evaded scrutiny by competition law authorities. As this contribution shows, this is not necessarily because of a...

Hong Kong has only had cross-sector competition law since 2015, but the city’s telecommunications markets have been subject to sector-specific antitrust provisions for over two decades. The importance of nurturing an efficient, innovative, and competitive telecoms industry for Hong Kong’s...

The popular perception of modern antitrust is that it has evolved into an economic and technocratic discipline that is largely apolitical and non-ideological. In this paper, I question this perception and argue that ideology does matter in the antitrust debate, particularly with respect to...

The Bell Atlantic v Twombly and Ashcroft v Iqbal Supreme Court opinions refined the threshold for motions to dismiss claims. In elaborating on these thresholds, the Court discussed the legal interplay of “possibility,” “plausibility,” and “probability.” The Court emphasized that...

Patent holders are, with increasing frequency, making public promises to refrain from asserting patents under certain conditions, or to license patents on terms that are “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND). These promises or “patent pledges” generally precede formal license...