Do the fining rules treat small companies badly? This is an occasional criticism of the 2006 Guidelines on Fines. Is it accurate? Let’s take an intentionally simplified example. Nine companies each have value of sales of 10m euros per year in a product which they cartelise. All are equally culpable (no aggravating or mitigating circumstances to take into account), save for the duration of their participation in the cartel – three had a short duration, three medium, and three long. The only other relevant difference between the companies is their total worldwide turnover; similarly three had a small turnover, three medium, three long. This gives us nine different companies which we can group – for example – by their worldwide […]
I’ll be speaking together with Johan Ysewyn at this conference on cartel developments over the last 12 months. You can take a look at the slides from the last conference here.
GCR has an interview with Judge Forwood – subscribers only I’m afraid – which touches on a number of issues of competition, and more specifically, cartel, enforcement, in particular the evolving nature of the enforcement system now that public and private enforcement are increasingly intertwined. Worth reading in particular for comments on the standard of judicial review, on publications of Commission decisions, and on lengths of proceedings at both Commission and Court level.
In light of today’s Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality proposals, I thought I’d look again at what I wrote in 2011 in Competition Law and Regulation of Technology Markets comparing EU and US telecoms regulation. Given that Chairman Wheeler has indicated that reclassification as Title II will not include unbundling requirements, the point I make below about the network neutrality debate in the US being conducted in behavioural rather than structural terms looks likely to remain true. 8.341 The US debate over whether cable or DSL service should be a telecoms or an internet service and the resulting regulatory consequences is necessary given the wording of the 1996 Telecoms Act, but seems metaphysical at best. The chokepoint, the point of the […]