ARTICLE 19 is happy to have contributed to a joint response to the European Fee’s public session on the Review of the Merger Guidelines as a part of the Digital Merger Watch coalition.
Digital Merger Watch is a worldwide initiative of 17 member organisations devoted to scrutinising and difficult Large Tech’s efforts to strengthen its dominance by way of mergers and acquisitions.
A dynamic and complete enforcement of the EU Merger Regulation is key to maintain EU markets aggressive, honest, and open. The overview of the Horizontal Merger Tips and Non-Horizontal Merger Tips presents an opportune second for the European Fee to critically assess and forestall additional focus of EU markets whereas facilitating innovation, variety and selection.
The Merger Regulation has been severely underenforced during the last 20 years: throughout this, interval 7,354 merger notifications have been submitted to the European Fee, leading to 176 (2.39%) formal investigations, and of which solely 15 (0.2%) have been blocked.
Within the submission, we suggest 10 key suggestions that the brand new tips ought to handle. These embrace, amongst others, the necessity for added metrics past the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) to measure competitors resembling markups, variety, alternative and pluralism; that vigorous enforcement is prioritised over a ‘wait-and-see’ strategy to markets which are liable to tipping and leveraging practices and that new tips additionally think about the affect of digital markets on labour markets.
Furthermore, we name for brand new tips to elucidate how an atmosphere will likely be preserved the place small but progressive startups can problem established corporations, particularly in digital markets.
You possibly can learn the total submission here.
