Competition law applies horizontally in all sectors, in addition to sector-specific regulation. Antitrust and merger control cases abound in the telecoms and media sectors, with significant cases also occurring in the postal sector. In addition, the rise of the data economy is challenging traditional approaches to assess market power.

Cullen International’s cross-sectoral Competition Law service tracks and analyses all of these developments, allowing you to prepare for the business risks and commercial opportunities presented by antitrust and merger control rules. Our English language database of unbiased national and EU case summaries is organised around ten categories of cases: eight covering different forms of abuse of dominance, plus those covering restrictive agreements and mergers.

Over the next ten weeks, we will share with you one case summary per week from each of these categories.

Stay tuned for our special case selection and let us surprise you with some cases you may not have known about! We trust you will find our case selection interesting.

Case 1: Favouring as abuse of dominance

Our first highlighted case is from the UK and looks at alleged abusive favouring (falling into the category of other abuses of dominance). Favouring one’s own services is a novel type of abuse of dominance only recently prohibited by the European Commission in the Google Shopping case.

However, one year even before the Commission imposed the highest antitrust fine ever (€2.42bn!) on Google, a UK High Court judge ruled in a similar case that the alleged systematic promotion by Google of its own online map services did nothave an appreciable effect on competition. Case law in this area may still evolve, as the EU Courts in Luxembourg have not yet been involved to set a clear precedent.