Annotation on the Judgment of the General Court of 11 December 2013 in Case T-79/12, Cisco Systems Inc. and Messagenet SpA v Commission

On 11 December 2013, the General Court issued a judgment (the “Cisco judgment”) dismissing the action for annulment of Cisco Systems Inc. (“Cisco”) and Messagenet SpA (“Messagenet”; together with Cisco, the “applicants”) of Commission Decision of 7 October 2011 declaring the acquisition of Skype Global Sàrl (“Skype”) by Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”) to be compatible with the EU merger control rules (the “Microsoft/Skype decision”). The General Court found that the European Commission (the “Commission”) had correctly decided following a standard Phase I review that the horizontal effects of the transaction on the consumer communications market did not give rise to competition concerns despite a combined market share of near-monopoly levels in a particular segment of that market. The General Court also found that the Commission had not committed any errors in concluding that the potential preferential interoperability between Lync, Microsoft’s enterprise communications software, and Skype would not give rise to any harmful conglomerate effects on the neighbouring enterprise communications market.