Conference programme

Heads of leading agencies will together discuss recent developments, what they are prioritising today and what they expect the focus of competition law to be going forward. They will also talk about how they coordinate their work and what international cooperation among the world’s antitrust agencies will look like in the coming years.

Merger control, which used to be a relatively predictable area of competition law, is now undergoing major developments all around the globe including in Europe. The days of a light touch approach are clearly over: competition authorities globally and in Europe are reviewing an ever-wider range of transactions. Add to this the now up and running EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation. The result is the need for detailed transaction planning from a regulatory perspective. This panel will discuss how companies can navigate this complex landscape.

Professor Eleanor Fox from New York University School of Law, will address the group with a speech titled The food security crisis: the role for competition policy

In March 2023, the European Commission (the ‘Commission) published a Communication and Annex amending its 2008 guidance on enforcement priorities concerning exclusionary abuses. This came in conjunction with a call for evidence to seek feedback on the proposed introduction by the Commission of guidelines on exclusionary abuses of dominance. The Commission is seeking to adopt their new guidelines by the end of 2025. This panel will explore the concepts contained in the draft guidelines with a view to determining how they fit with the approach agencies around the world are taking towards enforcing against misuse of market power.

Fast-developing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been attracting increasing attention in recent years. The use of pricing algorithms to facilitate collusion is one of the hottest topics in the area of antitrust. Is it a collusive agreement when competitors knowingly use the same AI technology to monitor and adjust prices? Even where the algorithm only recommends rather than determines prices and actual prices can differ? In a recent US residential housing case, the US agencies say yes and yes. And in a recent US class action, it is claimed that hotels collude on prices through a common software program. Other competition authorities are considering these and other AI-related issues as they apply across a range of businesses. Some scholars have even posited whether pricing algorithms may ‘autonomously’ learn to collude. The session will examine the latest thinking in this largely undeveloped area of antitrust.

This panel will explore the European competition law aspects of the Illumina/Grail saga, a case that has been hotly debated in the global competition community. Our panel of experts in antitrust law will examine the European Commission's various decisions in the matter (including on jurisdiction and the prohibition of the acquisition of Grail by Illumina) as well as the various challenges to these decisions in front of European courts. This panel will be adversarial in style, looking at the case from all sides to provide a 360-degree perspective for the audience.