Comments to the Commission’s Draft Horizontal Guidelines”Standardization

This brief paper sets out our comments on Section 7 of the Draft Guidelines on the applicability of Article 101 of the TFEU to horizontal co-operation agreements (“Draft Guidelines”) and, in particular, on the criteria for assessment of standardization agreements.

We have three main comments:

• First, technology owners participating in a standard-setting process compete to have their technologies selected into the standard. A standardiza