Professor Renato Nazzini

24/03/2023

I look forward to being in Paris next week to feature in Terminator 2: Judgment Day at the GAR Live Conference on Construction Disputes as part of the Paris Arbitration Week!

12/12/2019

Last month, on 13 November 2019, I was delighted to give the keynote speech at the St. Martin’s Conference 2019 at the Office for the Protection of Competition of the Czech Republic, in Brno, titled “A Competition Policy for the Digital Economy”. I looked at four areas of competition enforcement in the digital space: (1) algorithmic pricing; (2) data; (3) merger control; (4) abuse of dominance and burden of proof. I struggled to see where or in what way our current EU law framework is inadequate to address the competition issues that arise. Of course, the digital economy raises many, much more important issues that have nothing to do with competition policy, ranging from entrenching existing biases to new forms of profiling and discrimination, from opaque “controls”, or lack thereof, on information and freedom of expression to fostering novel, and yet unexplored, dimensions of inequality and exploitation, not to mention the unprecedented amount and level of detail of data about individuals that are available to businesses and the consequences that this may have on our very concept of uniqueness of the human being. We can all fight for a better world. This does not mean that all the problems of the world can be solved by competition policy.

18/06/2019

My presentation at the 5th Conference of the Italian Antitrust Association on the problem of algorithmic collusion in a data-driven digital economy.

23/05/2019

Transnational Construction Arbitration in the 21st Century,King’s College London, 6 June 2019. We shall be discussing topics such as adjudication in the UK and around the world, the use of artificial intelligence in projects and in arbitration, good faith and collaborative contracting and, last but not least, investment arbitration in construction.

16/05/2019

Can merger control address the perceived problem of acquisitions that stifle innovation or nascent competition? I had the opportunity to offer some reflections on this question at the Session on Digital Economy and Innovation of the International Competition Network Conference in Cartagena. Merger control can be used effectively in preventing competitive harm on digital markets but should never depart from rigorous, evidence-based analysis, on pain of causing significant losses in social welfare and innovation, both in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term.

24/04/2019

Delighted to give a lecture today at the Chinese Arbitration Association in Taipei on "Disclosure in International Arbitration: The Tension between Efficiency and Justice", focusing on how to tailor-made disclosure and/or document production rules to the requirements of the individual dispute.

11/03/2019

Tomorrow we shall be discussing Fairness, Innovation and Competition in the Data Economy at the Università Europea di Roma.My paper will focus on exploitative and exclusionary abuses involving deterioration of privacy standards. Is this something that competition law should be concerned about? My answer is yes, but on condition that the harm addressed is competitive harm, that is either: a) foreclosure of actual or potential competitors or; b) in jurisdictions that prohibit so-called "exploitative abuses", a particularly severe form of exercise of market power that the market itself cannot correct.

08/03/2019

My views on the Facebook decision by the German Competition Authority, looking at how competition law should deal with breaches of data protection legislation and, more generally, deteriorations in privacy standards.

10/12/2018

In the paper I presented on 26 November 2018 at the OECD Discussion on the Treatment of legally privileged information in competition proceedings, I address some of the pressing issues in this area that are, however, sometimes overlooked in the debate, such as what the constitutional foundations of the privilege are, what law applies to determine the scope of the privilege, including whether the adviser is to be considered a “lawyer” (the vexed question of whether privilege should apply to advice given by in-house counsel) and what information and communication are protected, what are the duties of a competition authority or a court to ensure that proceedings are, overall, fair, not least, in the EU, under Art 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and under Art 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The slides are now online on the OCED website.

This presentation by Renato NAZZINI, Professor of Law & Director of Research in Construction Law, King's College London, was made during the discussion “Treatm…

07/12/2018

On 5 December 2018, I gave a paper at the 12th London Conference on Standards and Patents. I focused on recent cases in FRAND litigation such as Unwired Planet v Huawei [2018] EWCA Civ 2344
Conversant Wireless Licensing v Huawei [2018] EWHC 808 (Pat), Apple Retail UK v Qualcomm UK [2018] EWHC 1188 (Pat), Huawei v Samsung (Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court 2018), FTC v Qualcomm (US DC ND Cal 2018). As well as the usual issues relating to the determination of FRAND rates, the meaning of FRAND or RAND commitments as a matter of contractual construction, the bundling of SEPs and non-SEPS, these cases also raise very interesting jurisdictional and procedural questions. If you are interested in some of my previous work in this area, please see:

R Nazzini, ‘FRAND-Encumbered Patents, Injunctions and Level Discrimination: What Next in the Interface between IP Rights and Competition Law?’ (2017) 40 World Competition 213 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3249059

A Jones and R Nazzini, 'The Effect of Competition Law on Patent Remedies', Brad Biddle, Jorge L. Contreras, Brian J. Love, and Norman V. Siebrasse, eds. Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2019), forthcoming https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3248905

09/11/2018

On 7 November 2018, I spoke at the FTC Hearing on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century - The Intersection of Big Data, Privacy, and Competition. My intervention focused on the impact on privacy regulations such as the GDPR on competition and dealt with three main points: a. privacy regulation as a potential hindrance to competition; b. privacy regulation as a potential enabler of competition; and c. privacy regulation as a parameter of competition. The session has been broadcast in streaming and the video is available on the website of the FTC.

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