Research projects
Research Papers on Article 82 EC
This report contains a set of research papers produced under the auspices of the Global Competition Law Centre. The papers comprised in this report cover the main issues raised by the application of Article 82 of the EC Treaty, which prohibits abuses of a dominant position.
These papers were written by teams of lawyers and economists specialized in the competition field. The authors of these papers also benefited from comments from a wider range of experts.
The teams that produced these research papers were instructed to critically examine the way Article 82 EC has been used to tackle a variety of anti-competitive behaviour by dominant firms, but also to come up with a set of policy proposals designed to offer some guidance on how the way Article 82 EC has been applied by national competition authorities, the Commission, as well as national and Community courts, could be improved. The objective of this report is thus not so much to criticize past decisions and judgments, but to come up with concrete proposals for improvement.
The timing of this report is not without its reasons. Over the past year, the Commission has engaged in a major internal effort to review the way Article 82 EC is applied to the business conduct of dominant firms. This initiative has been welcome by academics, practitioners, judges, and policy-makers as a positive development. While several areas of EC competition law have indeed been witnessing key reforms (modernisation of the application of Article 81, the new merger control regulation, etc.), Article 82 EC was seen by many as the next competition law provision, which needed to receive the< attention of the Commission.
Drafts of these papers were delivered at the GCLC’s Second Annual Conference, which took place on 16-17 June 2005 in Brussels, in the presence of DG Competition’s Director-General Philip Lowe as well as the members of the Commission team in charge of reviewing Article 82 EC. They have benefited from a wide range of comments subsequent to the event and can be found hereafter in their final form. We hope that these papers will contribute to the debate on the future of Article 82 EC and hopefully positively influence the draft guidelines that the Commission is planning to release by the end of 2005.
The GCLC should point out to the readers that the various positions defended in the papers do not represent the views of the GCLC, but only of the individual authors.
We would finally like to thank the authors of the papers for the time they spent preparing these reports, as well as the sponsors of the GCLC whose financial assistance has made the activities of the centre possible.