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 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 2: Antitrust boundaries for network co-investment

In our second highlighted case (in the category of restrictive agreements), the Italian competition authority is assessing which conditions would make acceptable a proposed joint rollout of a fibre network by competing telecoms operators, Telecom Italia and Fastweb.

The European Commission’s proposal to give regulatory relief to very high-capacity networks deployed under co-investment is one of the most debated issues in the ongoing review of the EU telecoms regulatory framework.

This pending Italian case will provide an intriguing benchmark of the conditions that competition authorities are likely to require to ensure that such cooperation agreements do not restrict competition in breach of article 101 TFEU.