CK Telecoms UK Investments v Commission—the Judgment That Defines a Significant Impediment to Effective Competition in Oligopolistic Merger Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 28 May 2020, the General Court of the European Union handed down a landmark judgment clarifying for the first time its interpretation of the significant impediment of effective competition test and the standard of proof that the European Commission needs to meet when establishing it. This judgment is expected to have a significant impact on European Union (EU) merger control and related policies across the EU. The General Court of the European Union issued its judgment in Case T-399/16 CK Telecoms UK Investments v Commission setting aside the 2016 European Commission (the ‘Commission’) decision, prohibiting the proposed acquisition by CK Hutchison Holdings Limited through its indirect subsidiary Hutchison 3G UK Investments Ltd (‘Three’) of Telefónica Europe Plc (‘O2’). The last annulment of a Commission’s decision on substantive grounds goes back 18 years ago when the Court of First Instance within the same year quashed three prohibition decisions issued by the Commission (Airtours/First Choice (T-342/99), Schneider/Legrand (T-310/01) and Tetra Laval/Sidel (T-5/02)). Further, it is the first judgment since the reform in 2004 that focuses on the interpretation of the ‘significant impediment to effective competition’ (‘SIEC’) test outlined in Article 2(3) of Regulation 139/2004 (European Union Merger Regulation ‘EUMR’).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".