What Economics Effects Approach? How Europe’s Highest Court Has Thrown a Spanner in the Works

(by Bruce Lyons) Buried in the long and technical European Court of Justice judgment in GlaxoSmithKline (6 October 2009), you may not have noticed paragraph 63: “Article 81 aims to protect not only the interests of competitors…” Hang on a minute –Commissioner Neelie Kroes has spent much of the last five years proselytising the excellent message that DG Comp “protects competition, not competitors” and is concerned with consumer welfare.  Although the Commission may have forgotten this message in this particular case, the CFI had been ready to step in to remind them.  Has the ECJ now thrown its black coat over both the CFI and the Commission and taken us back to the 1960s?