ANTITRUST ALERT
ANTITRUST ALERT
A Global Resource for Compliance Officers & Legal Advisors
ANTITRUST ALERT
A Global Resource for Compliance Officers & Legal Advisors

Digital Markets Act Now Firmly on its Way

By , , , and on Mar 31, 2022
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On March 24, 2022 the Council of the EU and the European Parliament reached political agreement on the “Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector” (Digital Markets Act or DMA). The political agreement comes just 15 months after the European Commission published its legislative proposal. The DMA aims to ensure fair and contestable markets in the digital sector. It will, once formally adopted, impose a set of prohibitions and obligations on “core platform services” providers that are designated “gatekeepers” under the DMA. It will also enable the Commission to carry out market investigations and sanction non-compliant behavior.

Along with the Digital Services Act, the DMA forms part of a comprehensive reform of the digital space in the European Union, and is a key component of the “European digital strategy” to make Europe fit for the digital age.

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Cartel Corner | March 2022

By , , , , , and on Mar 21, 2022
Posted In , , , , , ,

The US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division (Division) has continued to actively investigate and pursue alleged criminal violations of antitrust laws and collusive activity in government procurement. US Attorney General Merrick Garland noted in a March 2022 speech at the ABA Institute on White Collar Crime that the Division ended last fiscal year “with 146 open grand jury investigations—the most in 30 years.” As we near the end of the first quarter of 2022, the Division has a record number of criminal cases either in trial or awaiting trial.

In this installment of Cartel Corner, we examine and review recent and significant developments in antitrust criminal enforcement and profile what the Division has highlighted as its key priorities for enforcement. For 2022 and beyond, those priorities are—and likely will remain—identifying and aggressively pursuing alleged violations involving the labor markets, consumer products, government procurement, and the generic pharmaceutical industry.

Access the full report.



Changes to the Legislative Landscape of Belgian Competition Law

By , and on Mar 17, 2022
Posted In ,

On March 7, 2022, changes to both the Belgian Code of Economic Law (CEL) as well as the Belgian Criminal Code (BCC) were published in the Belgian Official Gazette (Belgisch Staatsblad, Moniteur belge).

The main changes include:

  • Introducing a filing fee in notifications of concentrations
  • Folding the rules and formalities relating to leniency programmes in the CEL and fine-tuning them
  • Fine-tuning the provisions on the cooperation with other NCAs and the European Commission
  • Expanding the circumstances in which periodic penalty payments and/or fines can be imposed
  • Clarifying which turnover needs to be taken into account for purposes of calculating fines imposed on associations of undertakings and how such fines are to be collected
  • Modifying the bid-rigging provision in the BCC to clarify that (criminal) immunity is available for bid-rigging infringements.

Save for the introduction of filing fees in concentration notifications, these changes were introduced to bring the Belgian competition law rules in line with “EU Directive 2019/1 to empower the competition authorities of the Member States to be more effective enforcers and to ensure the proper functioning of the internal market” or “ECN+ Directive” for short.

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Recent Treasury Department Report Emphasizes Fostering Competition in Labor Markets

By and on Mar 15, 2022
Posted In , , , , ,

Continuing the recent string of actions across the Biden administration in response to the July 2021 Executive Order on “Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” on March 7, 2022, the US Treasury Department (Treasury) released a report titled “The State of Labor Market Competition,” and on March 10, 2022, the US Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Labor (DOL) announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to strengthen and coordinate enforcement efforts in labor markets. These developments highlight the administration’s continuing focus on anticompetitive conduct in the labor markets at both the local and national levels and warrant careful attention by employers of all sizes and in all industries.

Treasury Report In Depth

  • Treasury’s report sets out to “summarize the prevalence and impact of uncompetitive firm behavior in labor markets.”
  • It focuses on both inter-employer conduct—such as the sharing of wage information, entering into no-poach agreements and outright conspiracies to fix wages—and employer-employee conduct—like forcing workers to sign non-compete agreements, mandatory arbitration agreements and class action waivers, misclassification of employees as independent contractors and opacity surrounding employees’ compensation rates—as being potentially anticompetitive and contributing to the imbalance of power between employers and employees in labor markets.
  • The structures of various labor markets, including overall low rates of unionization, “fissuring” of workplaces as a wide variety of job functions (e.g., janitorial or food services) are outsourced from in-house employees to external contractors, and occupational licensing requirements imposed by federal, state, and/or local governments, are highlighted as having overall negative effects on the competitiveness of various labor markets.
  • The report estimates that employers’ market power is responsible for approximately 20% lower wages compared to a fully competitive labor market, and notes that the harms that flow from a lack of labor market competition disproportionately impact lower-income occupations, women and people of color.
  • The report concludes by emphasizing that adverse effects on workers as a result of limited competition in labor markets have broader effects on the labor markets, the firms that participate in them and the economy as a whole.
  • Finally, the report specifically examines the labor markets in the healthcare, agricultural and minor-league baseball industries, and it outlines the Biden administration’s efforts to increase competition and deter and punish anticompetitive conduct in labor markets across the country.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

  • The DOJ and DOL’s MOU likewise emphasizes the shared “interest in protecting workers who have been harmed or may be at risk of being harmed as a result of anticompetitive conduct,” as Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter noted in the joint press release announcing the MOU, “[p]rotecting the right of workers to earn a fair wage is core to the work of both our agencies, and it will continue to receive extraordinary vigilance from the Antitrust Division.”
  • The MOU states the DOJ’s and DOL’s intent to “share enforcement information, collaborate on new policies, and ensure that workers are protected from collusion and unlawful employer behavior.”
    • [...]

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Kanter Signals DOJ to Follow FTC Lockstep, Calls for Substantial Change to Competition Enforcement Approach

By and on Mar 14, 2022
Posted In , , ,

In remarks delivered on January 18, 2022, and January 24, 2022, Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division, laid out the areas where he perceives shortcomings in antitrust enforcement. These speeches signaled that the Division, under Kanter’s direction, will take a more aggressive stance toward perceived anticompetitive conduct, echoing the changes in enforcement priorities at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Overview of AAG Kanter’s Remarks

  • Kanter intends to shape the regulatory landscape to better reflect dynamic markets. Both speeches featured a cohesive overarching message: Kanter believes that the regulatory and jurisprudential antitrust regime does not reflect and cannot address the market realities that exist today. Kanter believes that the Supreme Court of the United States’ 1992 opinion in Eastman Kodak v. Image Technology Services supports a change in approach because “[l]egal presumptions that rest on formalistic distinctions rather than actual market realities are generally disfavored in antitrust law.”[1] To address widespread increases in market concentration as well as “the economic and transformational technological changes” that define today’s economy, Kanter intends to revise the Division’s approach for analyzing mergers and conduct.[2]
  • Kanter seeks to revive dormant areas of antitrust enforcement, in particular monopolization cases with a focus on tech “platform” companies. Kanter stated that the Division has failed to adequately address certain areas of antitrust enforcement. He noted that it has been almost 20 years since the Division’s last major monopolization case.[3] Dominant tech platforms have “extracted private data” and “have few, if any, realistic alternatives,” he said.[4] Shortly after Kanter’s comments about prioritizing monopolization cases, Richard Powers, the deputy for criminal enforcement, stated that the Division will now evaluate Section 2 conduct for criminal charges.[5] Powers’s comments signal a dramatic change in enforcement, reversing decades of policy in which Section 2 charges were only brought in the civil context. These statements from Division leadership mirror those of FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has repeatedly called for more robust antitrust enforcement, and indicate that Kanter intends to reshape the Division, both in terms of resource allocation and approach to anticompetitive conduct, from a civil and criminal perspective.
  • Kanter laid out the Division’s overarching priorities clearly in his remarks. The Division intends to take a more aggressive stance on vertical merger enforcement, reformulate the Horizontal and Vertical Merger Guidelines to better reflect market realities (in the government’s view), enter into fewer consent decrees and instead litigate cases to generate judicial opinions and advance the relevant case law, and bring more civil and criminal conduct cases.

 
Vertical Merger Enforcement to Become a Focal Point for Regulators

  • Kanter stated that agency enforcement of vertical mergers has been lacking. Kanter believes that the Division has placed too much value on the potential efficiencies of vertical mergers without identifying the relevant theories of harm presented by such transactions.
  • The Division intends to [...]

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