5 Sport and EU competition law In applying EU competition law to sport, the Directorate General for Competition Policy (herein referred to as the Commission) has been caught between three powerful forces. First, the Commission has a constitutional commitment to promote and protect the free market principles on which much of the Treaty of Rome is based. In this capacity it shares a close relationship with the ECJ. The ECJ’s rulings in Walrave, Donà and Bosman have played an important role in placing sport on the EU’s systemic agenda in a regulatory form. The
a competition problem, and viewing it through that lens leads one to the quite erroneous conclusion that no problem is proven to exist: that ‘net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem’. 2 But competition policy is useful in helping us to understand both the limits of net neutrality as a problem, the limits of competition law’s ability to explore the problem and deliver behavioural or
The increasing commercialisation of sport raises important questions concerning regulation. The development of the European Union (EU) and the internationalization of sporting competition have added an international dimension to this debate. Yet sport is not only a business, it is a social and cultural activity. Can regulation at the EU level reconcile this tension? Adopting a distinctive legal and political analysis, this book argues that the EU is receptive to the claim of sport for special treatment before the law. It investigates the birth of EU sports law and policy by examining the impact of the Bosman ruling and other important European Court of Justice decisions, the relationship between sport and EU competition law, focusing particularly on the broadcasting of sport, the organization of sport and the international transfer system, and the relationship between sport and the EU Treaty, focusing in particular on the impact of the Amsterdam and Nice declarations on sport and the significance of the Helsinki report on sport. This text raises questions concerning the appropriate theoretical tools for analysing European integration.
This book explains the beginnings of net neutrality regulation in the United States and Europe, and some of the current debate over access to Specialised Services: fast lanes with higher Quality of Service (QoS). It examines the new European law of 2015 and the interaction between that law and interception/privacy. The book takes a deep dive into UK self- and co-regulation of net neutrality. In each of the national case studies, initial confusion at lack of clarity in net neutrality laws gave way to significant cases, particularly since 2014, which have given regulators the opportunity to clarify their legislation or regulation. The majority of such cases relate to mobile net neutrality, and in particular so-called 'zero rating' practices. The book compares results and proposes a regulatory toolkit for those jurisdictions that intend effective practical partial or complete implementation of net neutrality. It sets out a future research agenda for exploring implementation of regulation. The book outlines competition policy's purpose, referring to the exceptionally rigorous recent analysis of competition law suitability to regulate net neutrality by Maniadaki. Having analysed regulatory tools with little chance of success, it then examines what communications regulators actually do: regulating telecoms access based on the UK case study. The book considers whether zero rating poses a serious challenge to Open Internet use. It explores some of the wider international problems of regulating the newest manifestation of discrimination: zero rating. The book also considers the various means by which government can regulate net neutrality.
understood as constituting a legal relationship – social norms become legal norms’ (Gardiner et al. 1998: 66). Juridification therefore refers to the process through which the general laws of the land penetrate the internal laws of sport. The juridification of sport accelerated interest in the idea of sport and the law as an area of legal study. Established general legal principles deriving from, for instance, criminal law, contract law, the law of torts, public law, administrative law, property law, competition law, EU law, company law, fiscal law and human rights law
sports law will affect the future direction of EU sports policy and vice versa. Sport and EU law: Single Market sports regulation Within national legal systems established general legal principles deriving from criminal law, contract law, the law of torts, public law, administrative law, property law, competition law, company law and fiscal law have gradually impinged upon the operation of sport. This process of juridification appears to be closely associated with the commercialisation of sport, although the relationship between sport and the law has a long history
that Article 81 and 82 dealing with competition law also apply (considered in Chapter 5). Walrave v. Union Cycliste International 1974 Bruno Walrave and Noppie Koch were two Dutch professional pacemakers in motor-paced cycle races. Participants in these races ride pedal powered cycles. Each participant has a pacemaker on a motorcycle whom he follows. The pacemakers, who wear special clothing, aim to create a moving vacuum 86 Sports law and policy in the European Union for the cyclist (stayer) to ride in. This enables the stayer to achieve speeds in excess of what
Although the TWF Directive was a success for the Parliament, the ECJ’s ruling in Bosman and the approach adopted by the Commission in applying competition law demonstrated to the socio-cultural coalition the insensitivity with which the EU dealt with sporting issues. The perception was that the EU was not only failing to recognise the social importance of sport, but it was also curtailing sporting ‘autonomy’. A Treaty Article was therefore required in order to address these two concerns. As a result, in the run to the Amsterdam Summit, intense lobbying took place for the
audiovisual networks. At the time of writing, it is not at all clear how regulators will react to the mass mobilisations of users in the US (2014), India (2015) and potentially Europe (2016). Political scientists will find this a challenging and illuminating area to study, but for regulatory lawyers it is enough to remark that competition law will not entirely meet this challenge, as I explore in Chapter 2 . A
productive organisation in interaction with a competition regulatory environment. Best argues strongly that this development was an unintended consequence of an institutional countervailance between MITI and the Free Trade Commission, preventing either the dominance of centralised and directive planning or the imposition of US-style competition law. United States industrial regulatory policy had presumed the idea of perfect markets and defined inter-firm co-operation as collusion against the public interest. Japanese industrial policy, in contrast, has been based on the