July 22, 2019

On 15 July, the European Commission published the Report on Competition Policy for 2018. The Report, published annually, provides detailed information on the most important policy and legislative initiatives, and on decisions adopted by the European Commission in application of EU competition law during the previous year. To read the Report on Competition Policy in full, click here.

The Report is composed of two documents: a Communication from the Commission (to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions) and a Commission Staff Working Paper describing the developments in more detail (providing details of important judgments and preliminary rulings issued by the European Courts as well as sectoral overviews of Commission competition activity in several areas.

The Communication provides information under eight key headings:

• Fostering a competitive internal market for the benefit of European companies and consumers alike;
• Enhancing the effectiveness of competition enforcement;
• Tackling new challenges in the digital economy;
• Competition policy in support of the EU’s energy and environment objectives;
• Protecting competition in the Single Market;
• Making the financial sector more resilient in a Banking Union context;
• Ensuring a level playing field in the area of taxation; and
• Joining forces in fostering a global competition culture.

The Communication notes that the digitalisation of the economy has profoundly transformed consumer behaviour and how markets operate. In terms of tackling new challenges in the digital economy, the Communication highlights data (and the growing importance of algorithms) and the increasing market power of digital platforms with a dual role, providing for a distribution channel for others while marketing their own products.

The Staff Working Paper underlines that adapting to an increasingly digital environment is a major challenge for the enforcement of EU competition policy. New sophisticated IT tools and algorithms used by economic operators combined with an exponential increase in electronic communications, quantity of data and the number of documents on case files make many competition investigations increasingly complex and burdensome.