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Whish, Richard --- "National Competition Law Goals and the Commission’s Guidance on Article 82 EC: The UK Experience" [2011] ELECD 296; in Pace, Federico Lorenzo (ed), "European Competition Law: The Impact of the Commission’s Guidance on Article 102" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: European Competition Law: The Impact of the Commission’s Guidance on Article 102

Editor(s): Pace, Federico Lorenzo

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848447738

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: National Competition Law Goals and the Commission’s Guidance on Article 82 EC: The UK Experience

Author(s): Whish, Richard

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

7. National competition law goals
and the Commission's Guidance on
Article 82 EC: the UK experience
Richard Whish

1 INTRODUCTION

Article 82 EC is primarily directed towards the unilateral conduct of indi-
vidually dominant firms which use their market power in an exploitative
or in an exclusionary manner; Article 82 can also apply to the unilateral or
collective abuse of a collective dominant position, a subject that will not be
discussed in this chapter. The application of Article 82 to individually dom-
inant undertakings in practice has, for many years, been controversial: this
subject has probably attracted more criticism than any other topic within
European Community competition law. This chapter will consider briefly
the nature of this criticism and the European Commission's reaction to it,
specifically in the form of its 2009 Communication entitled `Guidance on
the Commission's enforcement priorities in applying Article 82 of the EC
Treaty to abusive exclusionary conduct by dominant undertakings'1 (here-
after `the Guidance'); it will then consider the UK experience of dealing
with the unilateral behaviour of dominant undertakings, in particular in
the years since 2000, when the Competition Act 1998 entered into force.
Section 2 of this chapter discusses the background to and the contents
of the Commission's Guidance, and explains why this author considers
the Guidance to be an important and timely contribution to our collective
understanding of this difficult subject. Section 3 describes in outline the
historical position in the UK on the subject of unilateral ...