Your Weekly Digest | Issue 210

The Department of Justice announced today that it is requiring Intuit Inc. and Credit Karma Inc. (Credit Karma) to divest Credit Karma’s tax business, Credit Karma Tax, to Square Inc. in order for Intuit, the creator of TurboTax, to proceed with its $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma.  The department said that without this divestiture, the proposed transaction would substantially lessen competition for digital do-it-yourself (DDIY) tax preparation products, which are software programs used by American taxpayers to prepare and file their federal and state returns. Read more.

The investigation conducted by the AdC revealed that the supermarket chains used their commercial relationship with the supplier Active Brands (formerly a company of Gestvinus/João Portugal Ramos Group) to align the retail prices of most of the latter’s products, to the detriment of consumers. Read more.

The Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) issued today its judgment in Case C-59/19 Wikingerhof v. Booking.com. This ruling will certainly be of great interest to the corporate victims of abuses of a dominant digital platform. This judgment addresses both the nature of the action which alleged victims of... Read more.

In June 2020, the South African Competition Tribunal (Tribunal) handed down two seminal decisions (Babelegi and Dis-Chem) in relation to “excessive pricing” during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Tribunal found that both respondents had engaged in excessive pricing in relation to the sale of facemasks. Read more.

Antitrust action tends to force competition into the market, even without a victory. Read more.

Pablo Ibáñez Colomo
November 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of the opening of an investigation against Google’s practices in relation to search. It is remarkable to realise how much the EU competition law landscape has changed since then. Read more.

Jérémie Jourdan, Fanny Abouzeid
This article follows our 2018 survey on competition and fundamental rights1 and covers the period July 2018–July 2020. Like the last edition, it highlights key judgments of European Union (EU) and national courts, as well as a few administrative decisions or reports addressing interesting procedural issues, without claiming to be exhaustive. Read more.

Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Wanjia Zhu, Christopher Sullivan
This paper investigates firms’ post-merger product repositioning. We compile information on conglomerate firms’ additions and removals of products for a sample... Read more.