Monday, 17 June 2019, One Bishops Square, London

8.00: Welcome coffee and registration

8.15: Chairs’ opening remarks

Antonio Bavasso, Allen & Overy, London 
Laurent Garzaniti, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Brussels

8.30: Keynote address

Isabelle de Silva, President, Authority of Competition, Paris

9.00: Fairness, privacy and other policy goals and their implication for antitrust enforcement in the telecoms, media and technology sectors

Regulators and private practitioners will explore the extent to which antitrust enforcement should or should not pursue other policy objectives in the TMT sector. This is a very topical issue given the increased pressure on competition authorities to take into consideration in their actions broader goals such as fairness, consumer protection, privacy and media plurality, accuracy and accountability (in case of bias and fake news). This raises the issue of the respective scope and interaction between competition law and other regulations that also aim at protecting these objectives. The European Commission has touched on the issue in its merger review of Facebook/WhatsApp and more recently Microsoft/LinkedIn. It is at the core of the FCO pending investigation of Facebook’s privacy policy in Germany.

Moderator:
Laurent Garzaniti, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Brussels

Panel:
Brice Allibert, Deputy Head of Unit, Antitrust, DG Competition, European Commission, Brussels
David Foster, Frontier Economics, London
Maria Coppola, Counsel, International Antitrust, US Federal Trade Commission, Washington DC

10.15: Coffee break   

10.45: The in-house perspective: Antitrust and other policy goals for telecoms, media and technology companies

This panel continues the above discussion, providing an in-house counsel perspective on the extent to which antitrust enforcement should or should not pursue other policy objectives in the TMT sector.

Moderator:
Helen Jenkins, Oxera, Oxford and Brussels

Panel:
Munesh Mahtani, Google, London
Andrea Appella, Deputy General Counsel, Europe & Asia, 21st Century Fox, London
Eric Lipman, Senior Litigation Counsel, Antitrust & Competition, Uber, San Francisco
Timothy Lamb, Competition Counsel, Facebook, London

12.00: State aid for tech companies

The European Commission’s state aid enforcement has made the headlines over the last couple of years in particular with the investigation of favourable tax treatment granted by some Member States to a number of tech companies. This panel with gather a mix of expert practitioners and in-house counsels who will focus on the following issues:

• What can member states do to fund innovation?
• State aid and infrastructure financing - what is particular in the digital age?
• How do the state aid rules support or stifle growth in tech in the EU?
• Do state aid rules put Europe at a disadvantage globally?
• What is the impact of recent fiscal state aid enforcement on tech players?
• Is there a transatlantic divide, or a US bias?

Moderator:
Hein Hobbelen, Bird & Bird, Brussels and The Hague

Panel:
Andreas von Bonin, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Brussels
Ewoud Sakkers, Head of Unit, European Competition Network, DG Competition, European Commission, Brussels
Bruno Soria, NERA Economic Consulting, Madrid

13.00: Networking lunch   

14.15: Vertical mergers in the TMT sector: Paradigm shift or evolution?

This session will look at mergers with a particular focus on the media sector. Vertical mergers in the media have received a high degree of scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years. In the US with Comcast/NBC-Universal and in the EU with a number of cases including Liberty Global/De Vijver, Liberty Global/Ziggo, 21CF/Sky. The Liberty Global/Ziggo approval has successfully been challenged before the General Court and the high profile AT&T/Time Warner merger is currently being litigated in the US. More mergers have been announced. Are we going to see convergence or divergence across the Atlantic and will these mergers mark a departure from precedents?

Moderator:
Antonio Bavasso, Allen & Overy, London 

Panel:
Cristina Caffarra, Charles River Associates, Brussels and London
Daniel Culley, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Brussels and Washington, DC
Mai Fyfield, Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer, Sky, London
Gregory Crawford, Professor of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich

15.45: Chairs’ closing remarks 

Antonio Bavasso, Allen & Overy, London 
Laurent Garzaniti, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Brussels 

16.00: Close of conference