The EC Commission’s Review of the EU Competition Rules on Horizontal Agreements

It is no wonder that the revisions of the block exemption regulations for research and development agreements and specialization agreements, as well as the changes to the Horizontal Guidelines that the EC Commissions has proposed, have given rise to a lively debate on the proper regulation of agreements under EC antitrust law between actual and potential competitors and have uncovered some thorny policy issues. There are two principal reasons for this.

First, for many