Topic: Legislation and guidance

The European Commission has updated its horizontal block exemption regulation and related guidelines to introduce new rules on sustainability agreements, prompting the Dutch competition watchdog to promise to bring its own sustainability guidelines in line with those of the agency.

01 June 2023

Switzerland’s government has proposed several amendments to the country’s competition rules to “neutralise” controversial case law, although the national antitrust enforcer has warned they undermine its abilities and vowed to challenge them.

26 May 2023

Italy’s Competition Authority has published new guidelines on recently-introduced settlement rules that allow greater discounts for non-cartel infringements, diverging slightly from the European Commission's approach in a possible bid to halt a recent stretch of losses before the courts.

25 May 2023

Three members of The Law Society’s competition section are spearheading a push for greater ethnic diversity in the UK’s antitrust bar, recently organising a roundtable in partnership with the Competition and Markets Authority to discuss, promote and move forward the issue. In a conversation with GCR, Baker McKenzie partner Keith Jones, Ropes & Gray partner Ruchit Patel and Morgan Lewis & Bockius partner Omah Shah recap that meeting and explain how they – and the CMA – plan to go about achieving their mission.

12 May 2023

The European Commission’s draft gigabit recommendation risks “premature deregulation” by placing too much emphasis on achieving greater connectivity and not enough on promoting sustainable competition, a group of EU sector regulators has said.

10 May 2023

Czech lawmakers have provisionally empowered the national antitrust watchdog to use the contents of police wiretaps as evidence in cartel investigations, as part of the country’s wider transposition of the ECN+ Directive into national law.

09 May 2023

Margrethe Vestager has said competition agencies have done their job to help combat the current cost of living crisis, claiming the economic situation could have been even worse without antitrust enforcement.

05 May 2023

Some of the strongest potential witnesses in criminal antitrust cases lack the incentive to testify, a Department of Justice official has said.

05 May 2023

The Senate has heard arguments in favour of legislation that would force Google and potentially other major companies to break up their digital advertising businesses.

04 May 2023

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has urged the government to implement legal reforms tackling the harm Meta causes to consumers, after its latest digital platforms report concluded the company has “significant market power” in social media services.

03 May 2023