Telecommunications Mergers under the EC Competition Law and US Antitrust Law: Substantive Assessment and Procedural Cooperation

Abstract

While the telecommunications industry is subject to both general competition and industry-specific regulations and control, the correlation between the two might sometimes appear problematic. The area of merger control is a lucrative field for examination of these often overlapping regulatory regimes. This paper is an attempt to review and summarise the existing practice of the assessment of transnational mergers by antitrust authorities in the EU and US. Focused on the analysis of the several key telecom mergers jointly investigated by the European and American antitrust authorities, the paper compares regulatory approaches on both sides of the Atlantic and evaluates the impact of the specific features of the telecom industry on merger assessment. Cooperation between the enforcement authorities of the EU and US is discussed in order to evaluate the existing procedural cooperation arrangements as well as the convergence of the substantive laws of the EU and US. © 2008 Cambridge Student Law Review.