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 8: Rebates granted by dominant firms

Our eighth case (on rebates) highlights the tricky nature of assessing the potential abusiveness of discounts granted by dominant companies – as also illustrated by the September Intel ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU.

In this case, an appeal court annulled the decision of the Luxembourg competition authority, fining incumbent operator EPT €2.52m for anticompetitive rebates, because the authority had not made a proper assessment of their potential anticompetitive effect. The appeal court made an interesting analysis of how to apply the European Commission’s 2009 guidance on abuse of dominance to bundled (or multi-product) rebates.