The European Commission on March 27 showered the public with a series of documents heralding a new, more interventionist approach to enforce Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which prohibits “abuses of dominance.” This new approach threatens more aggressive, less economically sound enforcement of single-firm conduct in Europe.
EU courts may eventually constrain the Commission’s overreach in this area somewhat, but harmful business uncertainty will be the near-term reality. What’s more, the Commission’s new approach may unfortunately influence U.S. states that are considering European-style abuse-of-dominance amendments to their own substantive antitrust laws. As such, market-oriented U.S. antitrust commentators will need to be even more vigilant in keeping tabs of—and, where necessary, promptly critiquing—economically problematic shifts in European antitrust-enforcement policy.
The Commission’s Emerging Reassessment of Abuses of Dominance
In a press release summarizing its new initiative, the Commission made a “call for evidence” to obtain feedback on the adoption of first-time guidelines on exclusionary abuses of dominance under Article 102 TFEU.
In parallel, the Commission also published a “communication” announcing amendments to its 2008 guidance on enforcement priorities in challenging abusive exclusionary conduct. According to the press release, until final Article 102 guidelines are approved, this guidance “provides certain clarifications on its approach to determine whether to pursue cases of exclusionary conduct as a matter of priority.” An annex to the communication sets forth specific amendments to the 2008 guidance.
Finally, the Commission also released a competition policy brief (“a dynamic and workable effects-based approach to the abuse of dominance”) that discusses the policy justifications for the changes enumerated in the annex.
In short, the annex “toughens” the approach to abuse of dominance enforcement in five ways:
- It takes a broader view of what constitutes “anticompetitive foreclosure.” The Annex rejects the 2008 guidance’s emphasis on profitability (cases where a dominant firm can profitably maintain supracompetitive prices or profitably influence other parameters of competition) as key to prioritizing matters for enforcement. Instead, a new, far less-demanding prosecutorial standard is announced, one that views anticompetitive foreclosure as a situation “that allow[s] the dominant undertaking to negatively influence, to its own advantage and to the detriment of consumers, the various parameters of competition, such as price, production, innovation, variety or quality of goods or services.” Under this new approach, highly profitable competition on the merits (perhaps reflecting significant cost efficiencies) might be challenged, say, merely because enforcers were dissatisfied with a dominant firm’s particular pricing decisions, or the quality, variety, and “innovativeness” of its output. This would be a recipe for bureaucratic micromanagement of dominant firms’ business plans by competition-agency officials. The possibilities for arbitrary decision making by those officials, who may be sensitive to the interests of politically connected rent seekers (say, less-efficient competitors) are obvious.
- The annex diminishes the importance of economic efficiency in dominant-firm analysis. The Commission’s 2008 guidance specified that Commission enforcers “would generally intervene where the conduct concerned has already been or is capable of hampering competition from competitors that are considered to be as efficient as the dominant undertaking.” The revised 2023 guidance “recognizes that in certain circumstances a less efficient competitor should be taken into account when considering whether particular price-based conduct leads to anticompetitive foreclosure.” This amendment plainly invites selective-enforcement actions to assist less-efficient competitors, placing protection of those firms above consumer-welfare maximization. In order to avoid liability, dominant firms may choose to raise their prices or reduce their investments in cost-reducing innovations, so as to protect a relatively inefficient competitive fringe. The end result would be diminished consumer welfare.
- The annex encourages further micromanagement of dominant-firm pricing and other business decisions. Revised 2023 guidance invites the Commission to “examine economic data relating to prices” and to possible below-cost pricing, in considering whether a hypothetical as-efficient competitor would be foreclosed. Relatedly, the Commission encourages “taking into account other relevant quantitative and/or qualitative evidence” in determining whether an as-efficient competitor can compete “effectively” (emphasis added). This focus on often-subjective criteria such as “qualitative” indicia and the “effectiveness” of competition could subject dominant firms to costly new business-planning uncertainty. Similarly, the invitation to enforcers to “examine” prices may be viewed as a warning against “overaggressive” price discounting that would be expected to benefit consumers.
- The annex imposes new constraints on a firm’s decision as to whether or not to deal (beneficial voluntary exchange, an essential business freedom that underlies our free-market system – see here, for example). A revision to the 2008 guidance specifies that, “[i]n situations of constructive refusal to supply (subjecting access to ‘unfair conditions’), it is not appropriate to pursue as a matter of priority only cases concerning the provision of an indispensable input or the access to an essential facility.” This encourages complaints to Brussels enforcers by scores of companies that are denied an opportunity to deal with a dominant firm, due to “unfairness.” This may be expected to substantially undermine business efficiency, as firms stuck with the “dominant” label are required to enter into suboptimal supply relationships. Dynamic efficiency will also suffer, to the extent that intellectual-property holders are required to license on unfavorable terms (a reality that may be expected to diminish dominant firms’ incentives to invest in innovative activities).
- The annex threatens to increase the number of Commission “margin-squeeze” cases, whereby vertically integrated firms are required to offer favorable sales terms to, and thereby prop up, wholesalers who want to “compete” with them at retail. (See here for a more detailed discussion of the margin-squeeze concept.) The current standard for margin-squeeze liability already is far narrower in the United States than in Europe, due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in linkLine (2009).
Specifically, the annex announces margin-squeeze-related amendments to the 2008 guidance. The amendments aim to clarify that “it is not appropriate to pursue as a matter of priority margin squeeze cases only where those cases involve a product or service that is objectively necessary to be able to compete effectively on the downstream market.” This extends margin-squeeze downstream competitor-support obligations far beyond regulated industries; how far, only time will tell. (See here for an economic study indicating that even the Commission’s current less-intrusive margin-squeeze policy undermines consumer welfare.) The propping up of less-efficient competitors may, of course, be facilitated by having the dominant firm take the lead in raising retail prices, to ensure that the propped-up companies get “fair margins.” Such a result diminishes competitive vigor and (once again) directly harms consumers.
In sum, through the annex’s revisions to the 2008 guidance, the Commission has, without public comment (and well prior to the release of new first-time guidelines), taken several significant steps that predictably will reduce competitive vitality and harm consumers in those markets where “dominant firms” exist. Relatedly, of course, to the extent that innovative firms respond to incentives to “pull their punches” so as not to become dominant, dynamic competition will be curtailed. As such, consumers will suffer, and economic welfare will diminish.
How Will European Courts Respond?
Fortunately, there is a ray of hope for those concerned about the European Commission’s new interventionist philosophy regarding abuses of dominance. Although the annex and the related competition policy brief cite a host of EU judicial decisions in support of revisions to the guidance, their selective case references and interpretations of judicial holdings may be subject to question. I leave it to EU law experts (I am not one) to more thoroughly parse specific judicial opinions cited in the March 27 release. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the Commission may face some obstacles to dramatically “stepping up” its abuse-of-dominance enforcement actions along the lines suggested by the annex.
A number of relatively recent judicial decisions underscore the concerns that EU courts have demonstrated regarding the need for evidentiary backing and economic analysis to support the Commission’s findings of anticompetitive foreclosure. Let’s look at a few.
- In Intel v. Commission (2017), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) held that the Commission had failed to adequately assess whether Intel’s conditional rebates on certain microprocessors were capable of restricting competition on the basis of the “as-efficient competitor” (AEC) test, and referred the case back to the General Court. The ECJ also held that the balancing of the favorable and unfavorable effects of Intel’s rebate practice could only be carried out after an analysis of that practice’s ability to exclude at least as-efficient-competitors.
- In 2022, on remand, the General Court annulled the Commission’s determination (thereby erasing its 1.06 billion Euro fine) that Intel had abused its dominant position. The Court held that the Commission’s failure to respond to Intel’s argument that the AEC test was flawed, coupled with the Commission’s errors in its analysis of contested Intel practices, meant that the “analysis carried out by the Commission is incomplete and, in any event, does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or were likely to have, anticompetitive effects.”
- In Unilever Italia (2023), the ECJ responded to an Italian Council of State request for guidance in light of the Italian Competition Authority’s finding that Unilever had abused its dominant position through exclusivity clauses that covered the distribution of packaged ice cream in Italy. The court found that a competition authority is obliged to assess the actual capacity to exclude by taking into account evidence submitted by the dominant undertaking (in this case, the Italian Authority had failed to do so). The ECJ stated that its 2017 clarification of rebate-scheme analysis in Intel also was applicable to exclusivity clauses.
- Finally, in Qualcomm v. Commission (2022), the General Court set aside a 2018 Commission decision imposing a 1 billion Euro fine on Qualcomm for abuse of a dominant position in LTE chipsets. The Commission contended that Qualcomm’s 2011-2016 incentive payments to Apple for exclusivity reduced Apple’s incentive to shift suppliers and had the capability to foreclose Qualcomm’s competitors from the LTE-chipset market. The court found massive procedural irregularities by the Commission and held that the Commission had not shown that Qualcomm’s payments either had foreclosed or were capable of foreclosing competitors. The Court concluded that the Commission had seriously erred in the evidence it relied upon, and in its failure to take into account all relevant factors, as required under the 2022 Intel decision.
These decisions are not, of course, directly related to the specific changes announced in the annex. They do, however, raise serious questions about how EU judges will view new aggressive exclusionary-conduct theories based on amendments to the 2008 guidance. In particular, EU courts have signaled that they will:
- closely scrutinize Commission fact-finding and economic analysis in evaluating exclusionary-abuse cases;
- require enforcers to carefully weigh factual and economic submissions put forth by dominant firms under investigation;
- require that enforcers take economic-efficiency arguments seriously; and
- continue to view the “as-efficient competitor” concept as important, even though the Commission may seek to minimize the test’s significance.
In other words, in the EU, as in the United States, reviewing courts may “put a crimp” in efforts by national competition agencies to read case law very broadly, so as to “rein in” allegedly abusive dominant-firm conduct. In jurisdictions with strong rule-of-law traditions, enforcers propose but judges dispose. The kicker, however, is that judicial review takes time. In the near term, firms will have to absorb additional business-uncertainty costs.
What About the States?
“Monopolization”—rather than the European “abuse of a dominant position”—is, of course, the key single-firm conduct standard under U.S. federal antitrust law. But the debate over the Commission’s abuse-of-dominance standards nonetheless is significant to domestic American antitrust enforcement.
Under U.S. antitrust federalism, the individual states are empowered to enact antitrust legislation that goes beyond the strictures of federal antitrust law. Currently, several major states—New York, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—are considering antitrust bills that would add abuse of a dominant position as a new state antitrust cause of action (see here, here, here, and here). What’s more, the most populous U.S. state, California, may also consider similar legislation (see here). Such new laws would harmfully undermine consumer welfare (see my commentary here).
If certain states enacted a new abuse-of-dominance standard, it would be natural for their enforcers to look to EU enforcers (with their decades of relevant experience) for guidance in the area. As such, the annex (and future Commission guidelines, which one would expect to be consistent with the new annex guidance) could prove quite influential in promoting highly interventionist state policies that reach far beyond federal monopolization standards.
What’s worse, federal judicial case law that limits the scope of Sherman Act monopolization cases would have little or no influence in constraining state judges’ application of any new abuse-of-dominance standards. It is questionable that state judges would feel themselves empowered or even capable of independently applying often-confusing EU case law regarding abuse of dominance as a possible constraint on state officials’ prosecutions.
Conclusion
The Commission’s emerging guidance on abuse of dominance is bad for consumers and for competition. EU courts may constrain some Commission enforcement excesses, but that will take time, and new short-term business uncertainty costs are likely.
Moreover, negative effects may eventually also be felt in the United States if states enact proposed abuse-of-dominance prohibitions and state enforcers adopt the European Commission’s interventionist philosophy. State courts, applying an entirely new standard not found in federal law, should not be expected to play a significant role in curtailing aggressive state prosecutions for abuse of dominance.
Promoters of principled, effects-based, economics-centric antitrust enforcement should take heed. They must be prepared to highlight the ramifications of both foreign and state-level initiatives as they continue to advocate for market-based antitrust policies. Sound law & economics training for state enforcers and judges likely will become more important than ever.