ARTICLE 19 is pleased to have contributed to a joint response to the European Commission’s public consultation on the Review of the Merger Guidelines as part of the Digital Merger Watch coalition.
Digital Merger Watch is a global initiative of 17 member organisations dedicated to scrutinising and challenging Big Tech’s efforts to reinforce its dominance through mergers and acquisitions.
A dynamic and comprehensive enforcement of the EU Merger Regulation is fundamental to keep EU markets competitive, fair, and open. The review of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines and Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines presents an opportune moment for the European Commission to critically assess and prevent further concentration of EU markets while facilitating innovation, diversity and choice.
The Merger Regulation has been severely underenforced over the last 20 years: during this, period 7,354 merger notifications were submitted to the European Commission, resulting in 176 (2.39%) formal investigations, and of which only 15 (0.2%) were blocked.
In the submission, we propose 10 key recommendations that the new guidelines should address. These include, among others, the need for additional metrics beyond the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) to measure competition such as markups, diversity, choice and pluralism; that vigorous enforcement is prioritised over a ‘wait-and-see’ approach to markets that are prone to tipping and leveraging practices and that new guidelines also consider the impact of digital markets on labour markets.
Moreover, we call for new guidelines to explain how an environment will be preserved where small yet innovative startups can challenge established companies, especially in digital markets.
You can read the full submission here.