Report on the 25th Annual Competition Conference
Released on Apr 13, 2022
Daniel G Swanson and Thomas Janssens provide a Co-Chairs' Note for the Antitrust Committee, February 2020.
There has been a longstanding question over the constitutionality of the crime (under Irish law) of withholding from the Gardaí (Irish police), without reasonable excuse, any information which a person has about a criminal cartel and knows might materially assist in preventing, apprehending, prosecuting or convicting that cartel.
Peter Flynn and Victoria Turner report on a few significant developments in Canadian competition law, including: the Competition Tribunal’s decision in the Vancouver Airport Authority case; a public call-out for information by the Bureau regarding anti-competitive conduct in the digital economy; and significant policy developments and international cooperation at the Bureau.
In the last week of June 2019, a copy of a ground-breaking court ruling emerged on social media in China: the order by the Supreme People's Court in the case between Yutai Technology Feed and the Hainan Price Bureau. The order provides a direct answer to the question of whether or not the Chinese antitrust authorities bear the burden of proving the anti-competitive effects of companies' resale price maintenance conduct. China's highest court found that they do not.
At the end of 2019, the New Zealand Commerce Commission released two documents which provide interesting insights into its activities and the state of competition in New Zealand: a Complaints Snapshot and its Annual Review. The Commission also recently concluded its first market study, the results of which reflect the Commission’s ongoing focus on vertical competition issues.
In 2016, the Hungarian Competition Authority initiated a procedure against Apple Inc to review whether its commercial communication concerning the launch of the ‘Wi-Fi Assist’ feature (as incorporated into Apple’s operating system ‘iOS 9’) was in line with Hungarian legislation implementing the EU’s Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices.
The Henrik Kristoffersen case sheds light on the European approach to the weighing of interests between athletes' commercial marketing rights and the commercial marketing rights of (quasi) monopolised sports federations.
In the relatively new world of competition collective actions (class actions) in the UK, the focus has been on certification and, in particular, how this should be undertaken by the first instance court – the Competition Appeal Tribunal.