competitionlaw

By a recent decision made in the Case I689C the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) found that several ferry operators providing transport passenger services across the Gulf of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno, plus some joint ventures set up by them and a trade association infringed Article 101 TFEU in two ways. First, the parties did not comply with the commitments they gave to the ICA to close a previous Article 101 investigation concerning a market share agreement for some maritime links in the Gulf of Naples. Following several complaints filed by passengers, the ICA reopened the investigation it had closed with a commitment decision in October 2009. Then it found that the parties were replicating the same anti-competitive conducts, in the shape of coordination of their commercial policies and operative strategies, the ICA had detected in the previous investigation opened in 2008. Second, the ICA found that the parties breached Article 101 TFEU with a further anti-competitive...

By a Phase I decision the Commission unconditionally approved the Facebook $ 19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp ( Case No COMP/M.7217,Facebook/WhatsApp) . The Commission was required by the parties to review the transaction by means of a reasoned submission filed on the basis of Article 4(5) of the EU Merger Regulation. Indeed, the merger was not a concentration with EU dimension within the meaning of Article 1 EUMR falling within the Commission jurisdiction, since the EU turnover of WhatsApp in 2013 failed to met the financial thresholds in that provision. The Commission identified three relevant product markets affected by the concentration. It restrained the first relevant market, the market for consumer communication services, to the communication apps for smartphones, because WhatsApp was available only for this device. Following its approach in Microsoft/Skype (Case M.6281), upheld by the General Court in the case T-79/12, Cisco Systems and Messagenet v Commission, the Com...

By a commitment decision made on 16 January 2015 the Conseil de Concurrence de Luxembourg or Luxembourg Competition Authority (LCA) has recently closed an investigation into abusive conducts carried by the Municipality of Luxembourg (Case n. 2015-E-01, Pompes Funèbres ) By a regulation enacted in June 2014 the Municipality of Luxembourg (the Municipality) reserved to itself the provision of transport services of corpses within the municipal territory and towards the graveyards managed by the Municipality, with the exception of transport services having the origin in a different municipality. In other words, the June 2014 Regulation gave the Municipality a monopoly on transport services within its territory. The LCA started the investigation against the Municipality, following the receipt of a complaint filed by a trade association. The LCA applied the functional approach developed under EU law to establish whether the Municipality qualified as an undertaking, thereby being subject ...