European Union competition law

European competition law promotes the maintenance of competition within the European Union by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies to ensure that they do not create cartels and monopolies that would damage the interests of society. With a history that traces back to the prohibitions on the restraint of trade, and influenced by the experience of the United States Sherman Act 1890 and the Clayton Act 1914, European competition law today derives mostly from articles 101 to 109 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, as well as a series of Regulations and Directives. Four main policy areas include:

This last point is a unique characteristic of the European competition law regime. As the European Union is made up of independent member states, both competition policy and the creation of the European single market could be rendered ineffective were member states free to support national companies as they saw fit. A 2013 Civitas report lists some of the artifices used by participants to skirt the state aid rules on procurement. Primary authority for applying competition law within the European Union rests with European Commission and its Directorate General for Competition, although state aids in some sectors, such as agriculture, are handled by other Directorates General. The Directorates can mandate that improperly-given state aid be repaid, as was the case in 2012 with Malev Hungarian Airlines.

"people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."

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