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.

This is the last of ten cases that we share from each of these categories from our unique Competition Law database over the past ten weeks. We trust you find our case selection interesting!

Case 10: Refusal to supply

Our tenth and final case (in the refusal to deal category) illustrates how a vertically integrated incumbent operator cannot protect its (liberalised) retail business from competition by denying access to an essential wholesale input that it controls.

In this case, the Spanish postal incumbent refused without any objective justification to deliver administrative notifications injected into its network by alternative postal operators, effectively preventing them from winning contracts from public administrations.