Areti Maria (Iria) Kitsou

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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.  

On October 2, 2024, the General Court dismissed Crown’s and Silgan’s respective appeals[1] against a 2022 Commission decision imposing a total fine of €31.5 million for participating in a cartel concerning the sales of metal cans and closures in Germany between 2011 and 2014.[2]  The judgments serve as a reminder of the General Court’s tendency to defer to the Commission’s cartel enforcement practice, including on the conditions for accepting case referrals from national competition authorities, particularly in cases that were initially settled by the applicants. 

On June 1, 2023, the Commission published revised Research & Development and Specialization Block Exemption Regulations (“R&D BER” and “Specialization BER”, together the “HBERs”)[1] , as well as revised Guidelines on Horizontal Cooperation (“Horizontal Guidelines”).[2]  The new HBERs exempt certain agreements from the prohibition of Article 101(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (“TFEU”), subject to specific conditions, and accordingly create a so-called “safe harbor” for certain forms of horizontal cooperation.  Relatedly, the Horizontal Guidelines aim to guide undertakings in the interpretation and application of the revised HBERs, and thereby in their assessment of “various common types of horizontal cooperation agreements.”[3]