For all but cartel cases, the EC has been increasingly relying on commitment procedures to resolve competition concerns. Yet, despite their popularity, there is often confusion among commitments, settlements, and remedies. And with the recent Microsoft  fine, the question has to be asked: Just how certain can companies be about the finality of these agreements? […]

Seth Sacher, Mar 28, 2013 It may seem obvious that good trade policy can promote competition. That is, by opening up a domestic economy to increased trade, additional competitive pressures may be placed on domestic producers, thereby decreasing domestic market power and improving industry performance in the form of lower prices, production that is more […]

Paul Lugard, Martin Mollmann, Apr 01, 2013 No less than three recent high profile cases have put the EU antitrust commitment procedure in the spotlights. First, while the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) recently announced that it had terminated its investigation into Google’s services regarding search engines and web advertising, the EU Commission’s parallel attempts […]

Jose Gonzalez-Magaz, William Gordon, Mar 28, 2013 Parties seeking dual settlements with the European Commission and the U.S. antitrust agencies are challenged by their differing frameworks. Part of the complexity stems from their separate approaches to competition law enforcement, while other components of the problem relate to their respective settlement processes. Since Microsoft settled its […]

Ken Daly, Mar 28, 2013 In laudable efforts to increase its output, the European Commission has developed three tools-leniency, settlements, and commitments-to help it discover infringements of EU competition law, to help it prove those infringements, and to help it bring cases to a speedy conclusion. Although these tools encourage cooperation and do reduce the […]

Stefano Grassani, Mar 28, 2013 If an “EU antitrust hot topic of the month” award were to be attributed for March 2013, the prize would certainly go to the issue of commitments pursuant to article 9 of Regulation 1/2003, which made the front page of most antitrust newswires and blogs thanks to two notable cases. […]

Paul McGeown, Juliette Orologas, Mar 28, 2013 Until the European Commission slapped a U.S. $730 million fine on Microsoft at the beginning of March 2013 for failing to comply with the “choice screen” commitment that it had made in 2009 to close the Internet Explorer case, part-time antitrust watchers could have been forgiven for believing […]

Florian Wagner-von Papp, Mar 28, 2013 Article 9 Regulation (EC) 1/2003 introduced the commitment procedure into European Union (“EU”) law. What was initially expected to be a marginal modification of the Commission’s existing practice, intended to make the informal practice of settling cases more transparent, has since developed into the de facto default type of decision […]

Alexander Egorushkin, Mar 28, 2013 Over the last 10-20 years, the regulation of fines for antitrust violations has been amended several times in the United States and the European Union, significantly increasing the amount of imposed fines. Within the same time period, antitrust regulation and policy have spread across the globe and, as an enforcement […]