Written by Simon Harms
On 14 December 2010, the European Commission (the “Commission”) adopted a new suite of rules governing co-operation between actual or potential competitors, consisting of (i) guidelines on the applicability of EU competition law to horizontal co-operation agreements (the “Guidelines”) and (ii) two new block exemption regulations covering: (1) R&D agreements; and (2) specialisation and joint production agreements.
The Guidelines and block exemption regulations replaced existing rules which had been in place for a decade and cover a large variety of different types of horizontal co-operation agreements. In an effort to break down the myriad new rules to manageable proportions and in a user-friendly style, GTM has prepared a series of alerts which, in turn, examine the implications for the various categories of agreement. This alert focuses on standardisation agreements.1
Continue Reading EU competition: industry standards and antitrust compliance