by Kevin Coates | Jul 5, 2009 | General
This website will be – mostly – about technology and regulation: competition law – antitrust, merger control, State aid control – intellectual property law and sector regulation, in particular as these relate to information and communication markets, and in particular comparing EU and US approaches. I am an antitrust lawyer, and I have worked in this area for a while – in both public and private sectors. Now, I have just started a one year research fellowship at NYU School of Law comparing EU and US approaches. For the last couple of years I have been out of the sector, handling external communications for DG Competition (the part of the European Commission that handles competition enforcement – fining cartels, prohibiting anti-competitive mergers, vetting government aid to industry). High level presentation rather than low level detail. So when I decided to apply for a research fellowship I decided to get into the detail. I looked around at the main issues of the day – the collapse of the financial services system, the economic crisis in the real economy, the impending global disaster of climate change – and decided to research the regulation of technology markets. I decided to party like it’s...
by Kevin Coates | Mar 1, 1998 | Antitrust
[Note: A historical post. This was an article I wrote in 1998 on some of the early competition policy issues surrounding the then relatively new internet. It was republished in The Journal of World Intellectual Property, Volume 1, Issue 3, pages 571–582, May 1998] Competing for the Internet by Kevin Coates, DG IV- C-1, published in the EC Competition Policy Newsletter, February 1998 Introduction The Internet is not new: it has grown and developed over several decades. What has changed is the introduction of commerce to the Internet. Goods, services and information can be exchanged, bought and sold on the Internet; the provision of access to that marketplace has consequently become an increasingly commercial activity in its own right. As the importance of the Internet to commerce increases, so does the importance of the provision of access to the Internet. The purpose of this article is to set out briefly some of the main issues which have arisen in relation to the application of the EC competition rules to the commercial activities surrounding access to the Internet. This does not mean that all of the issues set out above have been the subject of cases before the Commission: a number of issues have been the subject of informal discussions but may well prove to be the subject of formal cases in the future. This article does not address the implications for the competition rules of the impact of the Internet on commerce generally, though these issues are being considered by the Commission. One area where the Commission has already considered these implications is in relation to the provision of...