Even though Europe is explicitly more willing to consider competitive injury than is the United States, and rather clearly a more active enforcer, there are still a couple of things you hear suggesting that really, we're moving towards one law of antitrust:

• The last time the EU reversed a merger approved in the US was Honeywell-GE in 2001.
• The EU and US talk all the time, through the ICN, through the Translatlantic Dialogue, you name it.
• They both use HH indexes.

I generally believe that international economic law harmonization is likely in many things, but antitrust, perhaps because of strong differences in the competition cultures of the two jurisdictions, is probably going to harmonize slower than most.  The jurisdictions took very different views about Microsoft, the ICN has been sidetracked into technical training, and antitrust in general is becoming a little like accounting, where Europe has the world's standard, and the US has the idiosyncratic one.  Unlike in acccounting, however, the pressure to change American exceptionalism is not likely to be as great.

Anyway, the UPS-TNT deal's undoing underscores this.  America has blocked mergers - it blocked T-Mobile - AT&T - but this doesn't feel like something that would have suffered the same fate in the American context.

Accounting, Administrative Law, Antitrust | Bookmark

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e2017d3ff1089b970c

Links to weblogs that reference The Cratering Of The UPS Deal Shows That Europe Is Still Different: