Indispensability and Article 102 TFEU: it is not about Bronner (and refusals), but about Van den Bergh Foods (and remedies)

By Pablo Ibañez Colomo, Chilling Competition

As you know, the hearing in the Google Shopping case took place last month – speaking of which: huge thanks to Lewis Crofts for his quasi-live tweeting of what was going on (all that follows is what I gathered from his reporting).

The question of the applicable legal test was always going to be central in Google Shopping. Lewis’s tweets confirm this view. A lot of time was spent, it seems, on whether the Commission should have established that non-discriminatory display on the Google platform was indispensable within the meaning of Bronner (and, I would presume, IMS Health, which provides the most precise definition of the concept in the case law).

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