Tag: Remedies
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The Vodafone/Three merger: the CMA seems inclined towards a gruelling remedy, but it’s not yet a done deal
The CMA never clears a merger on the basis of behavioural remedies. Such remedies do not deal with the source of the competition problem, they are susceptible to circumvention, they distort markets, and they are difficult to monitor. Everyone knows that. The CMA was so wedded to this principle that it was willing to die…
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Vodafone/Three switcheroo: would the introduction of a different fourth player get the merger through?
If Vodafone and Three merge, it will be the first time that the UK telecoms market would have less than four network operators since Orange and One2One entered the market in the early 1990s. The CMA would nowadays be expected to block 4-to-3 mergers, especially where there is little chance of a new market entrant,…
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Taming the big tech platforms: DG COMP’s remedy problem (as illustrated by the Google saga)
While the European Commission has often been hailed as the world’s fiercest antitrust enforcer for hanging down two major antitrust decisions against Google, i.e. the so-called Shopping and Android decisions, which were accompanied by hefty fines, the reality is that the companies harmed by Google’s behaviour are highly critical of these decisions given their lack…