Event Overview

A series of keynotes exploring both long-standing challenges and emerging priorities in competition and antitrust policy.

Key themes will include mergers and acquisitions, market concentration, and potential structural remedies.

The Commission has called for a ‘new approach’ to competition policy. Amidst profound geopolitical and economic upheaval, this new mandate must drive innovation and ensure competitiveness while remaining fair and true. Indeed, this is a challenge that must reconcile multiple, and at times competing, policy objectives.

Probing Europe’s new vision for competition policy, and how this may evolve to meet the demands of a new economic and geopolitical era, this opening session will seek to frame the debates to follow. Panellists will examine how enforcement, industrial policy, and sustainability can coexist within a coherent framework that supports growth, innovation, and European leadership on the global stage.

The EU is currently undertaking a significant review of its competition enforcement architecture. The Commission has sought feedback on its Antitrust Enforcement Framework, as well as both its Horizontal and Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines. These reforms are expected to modernise antitrust procedures, ensuring a dynamic and competitive single market, keeping pace with digitalisation and rapidly evolving market dynamics.

In this session, panellists will discuss the ongoing evolution of Europe’s competition policy tools. Discussion will examine the priorities, trade-offs, and challenges involved in modernisation; the debate provides a timely opportunity to reflect on how Europe might find the balance between speed and effectiveness in its enforcement framework.

The relationship between the EU’s competition authorities and the world’s major technology companies remains one of the most closely observed dynamics in global governance. Framed by landmark instruments such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), this often turbulent relationship has sat at the centre of an intensifying transatlantic rift.

This session will explore how EU competition policy is adapting to the challenges and opportunities presented by large technology firms. Discussion will focus on antitrust enforcement trends, insights from recent landmark cases, and the emerging influence of AI systems on competition policy and regulatory practice. Naturally, this session too provides an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the DMA, given its now concluded review and assumed update.

In an increasingly turbulent global arena, the role and impact of European competition policy is under growing scrutiny. Accordingly, this session examines how EU competition policy can remain effective in a world of divergent enforcement philosophies and strained multilateral governance.

Commentary will focus on how Europe’s relationship with other global powers is shaping its approach to antitrust and industrial policy, and where the impacts of these evolving relationships are already emerging. Topics will also include a comparison of global enforcement trends; the potential for multilateral fora like the WTO to help reduce regulatory fragmentation; and the degree to which Member States are stepping up on the international stage.

Reforming the Single Market is a central priority for the European Union. Building on the now infamous reports of Letta and Draghi, this year’s Single Market Strategy, together with the forthcoming Single Market Roadmap to 2028, form part of a broader effort to create a simpler, more seamless, and stronger domestic European market.

The central theme of this session, these reforms carry significant implications for competition policy. This debate will therefore consider the case for a more dynamic competition policy that supports innovation and enables European firms to scale effectively within a truly integrated market. Panellists will explore how developments in the Single Market are reshaping competition and antitrust policy, considering how these frameworks can better align with Europe’s broader goals of sovereignty and resilience. 

To conclude the inaugural Brussels Competition Policy Conference, delegates are invited to discuss the profound impacts of generative AI on both European competition policy and antirust enforcement.

While these technologies unleashing unprecedented opportunities for innovation, economic growth, and societal benefit, they raise important questions for the adequacy and adaptability of existing competition and intellectual property (IP) frameworks both here, in Europe, as well as across the international arena.