CLP - Regulatory Norms in Competition Law Assessment

Speaker: Professor Niamh Dunne (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Chair: Dr Stavros Makris (UCL Laws)

About the lecture 

By and large, EU competition law coexists peacefully with other regulatory norms. The existence of regulation does not oust the application of competition law, and compliance with one regime does not certify compliance with the other. In Meta Platforms, however, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice held that regulatory compliance (or non-compliance) may nonetheless provide a ‘vital clue’ as to whether behaviour is compatible with competition law in certain circumstances. This lecture will explore the implications of the Meta Platforms judgment and seek to explain and justify—if not necessarily defend—its approach.

We will consider, first, how regulation may shape the operation of markets and the actions of economic actors generally, and the consequences that follow for competition analysis. We then turn to two case studies where this question is particularly salient: cases where a regulatory norm is imported wholesale as the compliance standard for competition law, and cases where the anticompetitive conduct consists in ‘gaming’ or otherwise corrupting a regulatory framework. The lecture will ultimately argue that, where regulatory standards set the parameters of lawful competition in a market, a firm cannot object if the requirements of competition law reflect its regulatory obligations. But to constitute a competition violation in addition to a regulatory one, non-compliance or corrupt compliance requires something more, namely a deliberate positive act designed to give the firm an illegitimate market advantage.

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