On December 10, 2025, the General Court delivered the latest judgment in the long-running Intel saga.[1] The General Court upheld the Commission’s 2023 decision to fine Intel for abusing its dominant position in the market for x86 central processing units (“CPUs”) between October 2002 and December 2007 through ‘naked restrictions,’[2] but reduced Intel’s fine from €376 million to €237 million to reflect the “temporal and material scope of the infringement”.
As part of our response to the European Commission’s consultation on possible reforms to its merger control guidelines,[1] we
On May 8, 2025, the European Commission (the “EC”) launched a public consultation on the EU Merger Guidelines (together, the “Guidelines”), which describe the framework applied by the EC to assess the competitive impact of horizontal and non-horizontal mergers (the “Consultation”).[1] The Consultation responds to the Draghi Report’s call for “more forward-looking and agile” EU merger control that takes greater account of innovation and future competition in assessing mergers.[2]
Since the obligations under the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) started to apply to the first wave of gatekeepers in March 2024, there have been a number of important developments on the implementation and enforcement of the DMA by the Commission.[1] In particular, the Commission has: (i) adopted a second wave of designation decisions concerning Apple and Booking Holdings Inc. (“BHI”), while exempting other services of Apple, ByteDance, X Holdings Corp., and Microsoft; (ii) defended appeals before the European courts concerning a number of its designation and non-designation decisions; (iii) launched whistleblower tools for the DMA and the Digital Services Act (“DSA”); and (iv) opened non-compliance investigations against Meta, Alphabet, and Apple as well as specification proceedings into Apple’s compliance with DMA interoperability obligations.