The EU General Court rules on multilateral interchange fees going through the intricacies of art. 101(3) (MasterCard)

Case T-111/08, Mastercard. A priceless Art. 101(3) assessment* A while ago we wrote a post on The Slow Death of Article 101(3) TFEU, where we said that in recent European Commission, practice, only once the challenged agreement was not deemed to be a restriction by “object”, and that only in that case the Commission had carried out a serious Article 101(3) assessment. This was the Mastercard Interchange fees case, and last May the General Court rendered its Judgment on it. Over time we have realized that the longer and more serious a post is, the less readers read it (and this one will be quite lengthy). So, of the many complex and interesting issues raised by this case, we will only comment on a general point regarding the Court’s assessment of the interchange fee arrangements under