E-Commerce And Competition: The European Commission's Sector Inquiry

The European Commission's report on the e-commerce sector released in May (the Report) outlines the main trends and potential competition barriers in the online retail. Overall, the Commission did not deem necessary a review of the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (VBER). This means that despite the ongoing innovations in the e-commerce business models, at this moment the Commission does not anticipate any genuinely new and unfamiliar anticompetitive effects of hardcore restrictions. Business practices, offline or online, must be structured so as to avoid the currently effective price fixing, market partitioning and other hardcore restrictions.

So much for the legal certainty. Except for the above, the Report did not provide many indications on recent e-commerce hot topics and on how the Commission will assess them in the future.