ANALYSIS: Some Crisis Impacts in Antitrust Will Reverberate

Antitrust regulators adjusted quickly to the Covid-19 crisis and attendant economic disruption.

In general, competition authorities worldwide have been both flexible and resolute: flexible in suspending or bending rules to permit governments and businesses to pivot and meet challenges, and resolute in ensuring that any anticompetitive behavior undertaken during the crisis won’t get a pass once the dust settles.

Some of the issues coming into focus will consume a lot of minds and legal dollars for the next year (or several) while we figure out which parts of the changes wrought by the crisis are temporary and which ones will ...