II. Competition Law

The period under review (Autumn 2003–December 2006) saw in not only the expansion of the Union from 15 to 25 Member States, but also the attendant ‘big bang’, on 1 May 2004, in competition rules with the entry into operation of Regulations 1/2003 and 139/2004. The changes introduced by Regulation 1/2003 1 —primarily abandoning the notification/authorization procedure which had obtained since 1962 in favour of a directly effective Article 81(3) and exception légale , and including further measures enabling/compelling the decentralized enforcement of Articles 81 and 82—are discussed in previous notes 2 and (copiously) elsewhere, and it is not proposed to rerehearse them here. Rather, the concern is the manner in which the dust has settled, in what is, after the frenetic legislative change and the absorption of 10 new Member States into a new culture of competition, a time of consolidation

Authorization · Business · Competition (biology · Competition law · Computer security · Consolidation (business · Economics · Enforcement · European union · International trade · Law and economics · Legislature · Market economy · Member states · Monopoly · Political science · Accounting · Computer Science · Corporate Governance and Law · EU Law and Policy Analysis · European and International Law Studies · Law