Competition & Antitrust
Most Competition & Antitrust work in Brussels concentrates in three areas: M&A approvals, cartel or abuse of dominance investigations, and State aid cases. Law firms dominate spending in this field, with the leading competition practices including Covington, Freshfields, and DLA Piper. Since the 1990s, however, several Brussels public affairs consultancies have developed Competition & Antitrust practices providing added-value services in media relations, stakeholder outreach, and national competition authority engagement.
The global competitive context is driving the most significant shift in EU merger policy thinking for a generation. France and Germany have jointly called for EU competition rules to be reviewed to permit larger European companies to gain scale through mergers: ‘We need to review the current European competition rules and practices to check whether they are still appropriate.’ The Commission’s competitiveness agenda – crystallised in the Draghi and Letta reports – is creating political space for a more permissive approach to European consolidation, particularly in sectors including telecoms, energy, and financial services where European players lack the scale of US and Chinese competitors.
Transatlantic enforcement cooperation has weakened significantly. As the Financial Times reported: ‘US and European antitrust enforcers used to work so closely that Jonathan Kanter’s office in Washington was adorned with an elephant knitted by his then EU counterpart Margrethe Vestager. That camaraderie has all but evaporated.’ The Trump administration has diverged sharply from EU enforcement priorities, creating a bifurcated global competition environment. European cases against US Big Tech – Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon – are proceeding in the face of direct US government pushback.
The AI sector is generating entirely new competition questions: dominance in foundation models, cloud computing dependencies, API access, and the competitive implications of hyperscale investment in European AI infrastructure. These are becoming the most complex and consequential competition dossiers Brussels has seen in a decade.