The globalization of competition law in the new millennium

Uniform antitrust standards could contribute to opening world markets and limiting barriers to trade, but non-uniform standards and expensive and differing procedures can act in themselves as trade barriers. Moreover, as past history shows, aggressive enforcement of local antitrust laws can create trade tensions between countries. While there has recently been a trend toward greater convergence of standards and cooperation in transnational transactions, Kobak and Landers, building on Guzman, predicted that the manner in which the international community would try to cope with these social costs would probably, for at least the next decade, take the form of a multiplicity of bilateral cooperation rather than multilateral regulation. Recent developments have supported this prediction. The year 2000 saw further cooperation between the EU and US competition authorities, principally in the areas of penalizing and prosecuting cartel behavior and merger control regulation. Despite these developments and a proliferation of cooperation agreements between individual nations, the limitations of positive comity and supra-national approaches continued to be evident. The reasons for this include considerations of sovereignty, concerns about sharing confidential information, differences in competition policy between emerging and more established economies, and varying assessments of the role of competition law vis a vis trade policy. Efforts of the various international organizations, particularly World Trade Organization (WTO) and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to forge a consensus solution were inconclusive. The U.S. suggested a 'Global Competition Initiative,' a sort of G-7 for competition matters, which may be regarded as either a substitute or a complement to those efforts. Reprinted by permission of Berkeley Electronic Press