Voluntary Product Standards in Globalized Markets; An analyse of the US, EC and Swiss Antitrust Approaches Towards Private Standardization in a WTO Perspective

The current study describes the approaches followed by U.S., EC and Swiss antitrust authorities towards private standardization. Although the main focus is on competitionauthorities are bound by the disciplines of the WTO agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. After a summary of the current economic theory discussion on private standardization, the case law of each of these competition systems is analysed in detail. Moreover, the extraterritorial reach of each system is analysed in-depth, as standards often have effects outside the geographical area from wich their setters come from and as it is critical in today's globalized markets to understand which competition system might assert jurisdiction over a particular issue. The main conclusion of the study is that, although differences between the approaches followed by the various authorities still exist, the loopholes in the case law shall be remedied in a similar and WTO-compliant manner given the increased reliance on economic principles for the interpretation of competitionlaw and the strong similarities between the competition law concepts (e.g. : refusal to deal, essential facility, technology leverage, etc...) used to deal with private standardization issues. As private standardization has not yet received much attention from competition lawyers, this study aims at providing practicians and academics with a mainly de lege lata basis for the discussion.