On 17 March 2023, the European Commission’s Legal Service hosted its Inaugural Annual Conference in Brussels, in the Alcide de Gasperi conference room of the Charlemagne building. The room was packed at full capacity – Director-General Daniel Calleja Crespo compared the speed at which the (free) tickets were sold out to a pop concert. The interest in the conference was testament to the central role of the Legal Service for the functioning of the European Commission.
The impressive line-up of speakers included Commissioners Thierry Breton and Virginijus Sinkevičius, President of the General Court Marc van der Woude, Directors-General Olivier Guersent, Roberto Viola and Kurt Vandenberghe, in addition to host Daniel Calleja Crespo, Vice President of the Austrian Constitutional Court Verena Madner and French Conseiller d’État Fabien Raynaud, as well as Cani Fernández Vicién, the head of the Spanish competition authority. The Legal Service contributed on substance (André Bouquet) and also moderated the two panels – the DMA panel in the morning (Vittorio Di Bucci) and the panel on intergenerational justice in the afternoon (Marc van Hoof).
The morning panel started with warning words from Commissioner Thierry Breton (“We are enforcing!”) and President van der Woude (“The DMA will bring a bigger workload to the General Court, at the same time as it will also be faced with its first preliminary references” – but also: “The DMA is a lawyers’ paradise”). Speakers on the panel (in order of appearance) included Olivier Guersent, Cani Fernández Vicién, Kate Adams (General Counsel of Apple), Roberto Viola and Vicky Robertson. In her presentation, Vicky focused on the future of digital mergers against the background of Article 14 Digital Markets Act, which obliges gatekeepers to inform the European Commission of any digital acquisitions before carrying them out. While this obligation has no actual “teeth”, it needs to be seen together with the Commission’s recent interpretation of Article 22 European Merger Regulation on accepting referrals from national competition authorities even where the referring authority has no jurisdiction over a merger. The discussion then focused on the ne bis in idem principle and theories of harm for digital mergers.
You can tune in here: https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/the-first-annual-conference-of-the-european-commission-legal-service-20230317 (DMA panel started at 11am)
The programme can be found here: : https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2023-03/Programme_LegSerCONF.pdf
