The literature addressing the meaning of a commitment made by holders of patents ‘essential’ to a standard to licence such patents on ‘fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory’ (FRAND) terms and conditions is now substantial. While reaching quite different conclusions, a number of authors...

One of the most intractable competition issues for the European Commission (the “Commission”) over the last ten years has been to define the circumstances in which the licensing conduct or litigation strategy of a standard-essential patent (often referred to as “SEP”) holders amount to...

This paper has been accepted for publication in the Santa Clara University Computer & High Tech Law Journal. The vast majority of the products developed by the IT industry are technologically complex, incorporating hundreds or thousands of different components, and many of these components read...

The legal rules applicable to State compensation for services of general economic interest (“SGEIs”) were recently revised by the European Commission. This led to the adoption of the “2012 SGEI Package”. The most contentious document of this Package, the “2012 Framework”, sets out...

We review the burgeoning literature on two-sided markets focusing on the different definitions that have been proposed. In particular, we show that the well-known definition given by Evans is a particular case of the more general definition proposed by Rochet and Tirole. We then identify the...

In a companion note (Antitrust vs. Sector-specific Regulation in Telecom: What Works Best?), we argued that while the full liberalization of telecommunications markets provides scope for relying to a large extent on general antitrust rules and institutions as instruments of economic regulation,...

Price discrimination is one of the most complex areas of EC competition law. There are several reasons for this. First, the concept of price discrimination covers many different practices (discounts and rebates, tying, selective price cuts, discriminatory input prices set by...