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General Court Judgement on Orange Polska - Fine for Abusive Conduct

András Tóth


Two years after the Polish regulatory authority required the termination of the contested practice, the Commission found that the former Telekomunikacja Polska has abused its dominant position in the Polish wholesale broadband access market. Although the Commission’s Decision addressed a number of interesting sectoral issues (e.g. relevance of the essential facilities doctrines, maintaining incentives to invest and innovate, relationship between the ex-ante regulation and ex-post review) the GC’s judgement particularly reflects on technical aspects of the competition law raised by the applicant (e.g. interpretation of Article 7(1) of Regulation No 1/2003, calculation of fine taking into account the single continuous infringement, the gravity of the infringement and the investment made by TP). However, the most interesting sector-specific question of the case which is the parallel application of the ex-ante and ex-post regulation has not been addressed. The Orange Polska case suggests that the firepower of the European Competition Law is much greater than the national sector-specific regulation, which can be useful if the powers of regulatory authorities lack effectiveness.

Vice-president of the Hungarian Competition Authority and the Chairman of the Competition Council, Associate Professor and Head of the ICT Law Department at University of Károli in Budapest, Member of the European Networks Law and Regulation (ENLR) Editorial Board.

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