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Neelie Kroes on the Goals of Antitrust Intervention in Standards-based Industries

By Hanno Kaiser

In industries governed by standards, it is not always easy to identify the goal of antitrust intervention. Neelie Kroes defined it as follows:

When a market develops in such a way that a particular proprietary technology becomes a de facto standard, then the owner of that technology may have such power over the market that it can lock-in its customers and exclude its competitors’. Where a technology owner exploits that power, then a competition authority or a regulator may need to intervene. In essence, the competition authority has to recreate the conditions of competition that would have emerged from a properly carried out standardisation process.

This definition makes a collaborative standard setting process the normative benchmark even for de facto standards that evolve as a result of the operation of the marketplace.

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on June 10, 2008 (boomark / email).