Abstract
In this Chapter, it will be demonstrated that, over the years, a competition enforcement discrepancy (or “technology innovation time gap”) has emerged. It has become apparent that old regulatory tools, such as the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (and its accompanying Commission Guidelines) respond to past phenomena without being a means to anticipate upon and regulate not only future and unknown technological change, but also those technological innovations, such as Blockchain, which are too “young” to have any enforcement precedent which would provide an analytical background for the needs of block exemptions and the guidance which defines their application in practical terms. This will be analyzed in Section I below. Second, new tools are created to allow the Commission to react virtually immediately to new technological phenomena that introduce disruptive features into competition in certain markets, and this, with less and less procedural constraints. And this will be analyzed in Section II below.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Commission Regulation (EU) No 330/2010 of 20 April 2010, On the application of Article 101(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to categories of vertical agreements and concerted practices, OJEU 2010, n°L 102/1.
- 3.
European Commission, Guidelines on Vertical Restraints, OJEU 2010, n°C 130/1.
- 4.
European Commission (2020a).
- 5.
Commission Staff Working Document Evaluation of the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation, (SWD (2020) 173 Final).
- 6.
Id, p. 88.
- 7.
Id, p. 92.
- 8.
Id, p. 93.
- 9.
European Commission (2020a).
- 10.
Id., Section 1.3 (“Objectives of the Study”).
- 11.
Ibid, Section 4.1 (“Types of Vertical Restraints”).
- 12.
Ibid, Section 4.1.2 (“Legal certainty (…)”).
- 13.
European Commission (2018a).
- 14.
European Commission (2018b).
- 15.
Ibid, p. 6.
- 16.
European Commission (2020a).
- 17.
European Court of Justice, judgment of 6 December 2017, Coty Germany GmbH, Case C-230/16, EU: C: 2017.
- 18.
Id, para. 9–16.
- 19.
Id, para. 24 cf. European Court of Justice, judgment of 13 October 2011, Pierre Fabre, Dermo-Cosmétique, Case C-439/09, EU: C: 2011: 649, para. 49.
- 20.
Id, para. 25.
- 21.
Id, para. 49–58.
- 22.
European Commission (2018b).
- 23.
Feat (2020).
- 24.
Schrepel (2019, p. 118).
- 25.
Ibid, pp. 128–134.
- 26.
Brody (2017).
- 27.
EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum (2019).
- 28.
Id, pp. 20–21.
- 29.
Laitenberger (2018).
- 30.
Vestager (2019).
- 31.
Madero (2019).
- 32.
European Commission (2019).
- 33.
Madero (2019).
- 34.
European Commission (2020b).
- 35.
Vestager (2019).
- 36.
Id.
- 37.
European Commission (2020c).
- 38.
French Competition Authority (2020a).
- 39.
French Competition Authority (2020b).
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Kirch, P. (2022). The Technology Innovation Time Gap in Competition Law Enforcement: Assessing the European Commission’s Approach. In: Portuese, A. (eds) Algorithmic Antitrust. Economic Analysis of Law in European Legal Scholarship, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85859-9_7
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