4 Community Jurisdiction I: Concentration and Control

4.01 Most competition law regimes place high importance on the control of mergers, because mergers cannot be treated in the same way as other potentially anticompetitive practices. Accordingly, the first EU Treaty, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Treaty, expressly dealt with merger control in Article 66(1)–(6). The fact that such an express provision had been omitted from the EEC Treaty suggested that the control of mergers was not to be encompassed within the EEC competition law regime. However, the application by the Commission first of Article 1021...