Author:

Abstract

The recently enacted Digital Markets Act signifies a pivot in EU competition law. Although partially necessitated by the particular exigencies of the digital marketplace, the Regulation's exclusion of enforcement by national actors, lack of administrative constraints, and insulation from judicial review concentrates power within the European Commission, arresting a trend of decentralisation and retreating from prior legislative policy. This article seeks to analyse this novel prescriptive regime of ex ante, per se prohibitions from the perspective of institutional conflict between the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union. In sketching the history of EU competition law and identifying five distinct "phases" of its development, this article argues that essential structural, economic, and political characteristics of the European competition law regime have, themselves, been defined by competition: a competition not between undertakings, but between the Court and the Commission.

Keywords: EU, Competition, Antitrust, Decentralisation, Modernisation, Subsidiarity,

How to Cite: McIntyre, R., 2023. Decentralisation and Recentralisation: . LSE Law Review, 8(3), pp.227–285.