The Italian Competition Authority revokes the remedies imposed upon the incumbent pay-TV operator in relation to the acquisition of its main competitor’s pay-TV business due to market changes during COVID -19 (Sky / R2)

On April 12, 2022, the Italian Competition Authority (the AGCM [1] or “ICA”), following a formal investigation for the review of remedies imposed upon a concentration, revoked the measures that it had imposed on SKY Italian Holding SpA (“SKY”)—the leading pay-TV broadcaster in Italy—to offset the anti-competitive effects created by its late 2018 acquisition of the pay-TV technical platform R2 Srl (“R2”) from Mediaset Premium S.p.A (“Mediaset”). R2 provided exclusive technical platform services, enabling Mediaset to retail a pay-TV offering on DTT. Along with certain DTT [2] channels and related numbering (or LCNs) and other ancillary arrangements, R2 was the undertaking Mediaset used to compete against SKY in the pay-TV market in Italy. SKY filed the acquisition of R2 with the ICA at the