Competition watchdogs see bigger role for consumer

A study saying consumers should play a bigger role in reviewing mergers and antitrust cases won a positive response from some competition authorities and experts on Friday.

• The European Union’s Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has made a point of saying her work, whether it is fining cartels or giving mergers the go-ahead, is done with the aim of helping the consumer. But the study says more is needed.
• “Competition agencies need to give consumers a new deal by systemically including them at the beginning and end of their investigations,” said Phil Evans, author of “In Search of the Marginal Consumer”, written for the FIPRA consultancy.
• The study, to be formally released next week, was made available to participants at the St. Gallen International Competition Law Forum at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
• “It’s time the (European) Commission applied its rhetoric of consumer welfare to actual cases,” said Philip Marsden, director of the Competition Law Forum at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, after reading the 78-page study.
• Marsden said consumers should be consulted in cases concerning suspected abuse of dominance, such as ones that involved Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Intel.
• The director-general of competition for the EU’s executive European Commission, who wrote the introduction to the study without endorsing all its conclusions, agreed.
• “There’s never been a time when competition authorities needed to be more in touch with consumers,” Philip Lowe said. He said his agency has had a single consumer officer but now had opened a new, larger consumer policy unit.
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• There are more than 100 competition agencies worldwide, the most influential being in Washington and Brussels, capital of the 27-country EU. Such agencies promote competition by evaluating proposed mergers and by punishing firms that damage fair play by such methods as fixing prices.
• PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE
• The study also warns competition policy makers against talking to themselves instead of engaging with those beyond the lawyers and economists involved directly in antitrust.
• “Civil society is starting to take a greater interest in competition and competition policy, not always from a positive perspective,” it says.
• It invokes the specter of riots at a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle and says competition could face a negative reaction without more consumer involvement.
• The study recommends combining competition and consumer agencies, as in the United States and Britain. It also suggests more use of consumer polling and says consumer groups should give competition a higher priority. None was at the conference.
• Francois Souty, senior counsel for international affairs at the directorate for competition policy in the French Ministry of Economy, Industry and Employment, said agencies needed to provide “an opportunity for consumers and workers to give their views and have them taken into account”.
• Souty said representatives of consumer groups already served on panels of the French Competition Council, which decides cartel cases and those on abuse of dominance.