Consensual Antitrust in

High Tech Markets

Monday 16th June 2014

Registration at 5pm, 5.30pm-8pm

Speakers

Professor Damien Geradin, Tilburg University School of Law & Covington & Burling LLP

Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, University of Iowa Law School

Lars Kjølbye, Latham & Watkins LLP

Dr Ioannis Lianos, UCL Laws (& Chair)

Dr Florian Wagner-von Papp, UCL Laws

Emeritus Professor Richard Whish QC,
Dickson Poon School of Law, Kings' College London

This event will be accredited with 2.5 CPD hours by the SRA & BSB (pending)

The event aims to examine the propensity of EU competition law and US antitrust law to a certain degree to substitute full adjudication of competition law disputes in the high tech sector and proceed instead with either consent decrees, settlements or commitment decisions. The speakers will attempt to identify if there is such trend in the enforcement activity of the European Commission or national competition authorities (in Europe and the US), and, should this initial hypothesis be eventually confirmed, examine the conditions and parameters that seem to influence the choice of competition authorities for such consensual enforcement and explore if these are linked to the specific characteristics of high tech industries or more broadly the economic and technical complexity of such cases. Of course, the recent Google case will be discussed and we will try to analyse the implications of such choice for competition law and the underlying role for economic analysis in this context. The speakers will also take this opportunity to comment on the Intel judgment of the Court, should this be out before the conference, in order to understand how infringement decisions and commitment decisions may be combined by the European Commission in order to deal with the competition issues arising in high tech markets. The conference will aim to understand if consensual enforcement should still be perceived as chosen in exceptional circumstances only, the dominant or "normal" enforcement mechanism being the full adjudication of cases and eventually the adoption of an infringement decision, or if its development denotes a broader transformation of competition law enforcement in mature competition law systems, such as in Europe and the US. Should this new enforcement approach be followed in less mature competition law systems?