05 July 2018: 8th Franco-German Competition Day

On 3 July 2018, the Bundeskartellamt (the German competition authority), together with the Autorité de la concurrence, hosted the eighth Franco-German Competition Day. Among the approximately 100 conference participants were members of the French and German competition authorities, court judges, university professors, lawyers, company representatives, and representatives of trade associations.
The event was opened by the President of the Bundeskartellamt, Andreas Mundt, and the President of the French Autorité de la concurrence, Isabelle de Silva.

Andreas Mundt: "The Franco-German Competition Day bears witness to the long-standing and excellent cooperation between our authorities. A priority shared by both our authorities is to ensure open markets and effective competition in the digital economy. In order to be better placed for this, our authorities already published a joint working paper in 2016 on the competitive significance of data. Following this we have now launched a new joint project on algorithms and their effects on competition".

Isabelle de Silva stated that “the Autorité de la concurrence and the Bundeskartellamt share a common vision on numerous subjects, especially the desire to have an impact on issues arising from digital challenges. We are developing a reinforced bilateral cooperation which enables numerous exchanges on the understanding of new competition issues and leads to shared conceptual tools, for instance the study on algorithms and AI from which we expect a great deal.”

The focus of today’s conference were new developments in abuse control, as well as challenges for merger control in digital markets.

The Franco-German Competition Day is a biennial bilateral conference which has been hosted since 2004 in turn by the Autorité de la concurrence, and the Bundeskartellamt. The conferences deal with topics, which, apart from their significance for multilateral cooperation at European level, are also of particular importance for the bilateral relationship between the two countries or which address specific competition issues affecting both of them.