Open standards & antitrust

OPEN STANDARDS & ANTITRUST Open standards and competition law : an overview Jérôme GSTALTER Researcher, University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne 1. Contributors to this thematic study were asked to answer a question that seems simple on the surface : Do open standards promote competition ? However, this question raises a tricky and preliminary problem : how to define an “open standard” ? Written by eminent specialists, this set of articles reflects the difficulty of giving a clear-cut or a commonly agreed upon definition of an open standard. This difficulty is significantly intertwined with competition policy. This synthesis attempts to give an overview of these problems by addressing, first, the definition of an open standard (I) and, second, the competition policy with regard to an