There is an irresistible temptation that accompanies this economic crisis which has made the European people poorer and more insecure: that of considering the rules an option. They are respected as if they were an a la carte menu. This yes, that nì, because maybe a little too restrictive, that other really not: if you can't send it back to the sender, that is, to the legislator, asking for its abolition, you get around it.
It is a drift that must be stopped if the presumption that the rules are aimed at the common good. These are the rules, included in the European treaty, placed as a bulwark of competition. Yet the impatience with those rules is palpable. They are impatient companies, who in times of difficulty are more inclined to join forces to defend their own survival as best they can. it is there policy that has to deal with redundant companies and redundant workers. In this context do the market guardian it's not an easy job: the accusation of being dogmatic or of living on Mars is always around the corner.
Yet if there is any credit I give to this Antitrust is precisely that of having applied the rules of competition in a non-dogmatic way, trying to interpret the economic reality. The action of an Authority that must protect the market it cannot, for ontological reasons, favor the destruction of enterprises. If you are convinced that the Italian industrial fabric represents the backbone of our country (and I am) the task of the Antitrust is to help companies grow stronger. In a pragmatic way, indeed, and without dogmas. It is a dogma to believe that the market and the economic crises do justice to the less efficient: companies with enormous growth potential are often crushed, real 'jewels' for which a sudden block in funding can be fatal. On the other hand, it is not a dogma to believe that if businesses, to strengthen themselves, they do price agreements or on market shares harm consumers. And they must be stopped.
Instead, there is a schizophrenia in our country's economic debate: a spasmodic attention to supply, a lack of attention to demand. As if the first could grow without the other. Let i consumers feel prey to companies that work to harm them means creating an asphyxiated market, where trust will be lacking. An already weak demand as a result of the crisis would be even weaker. It wouldn't be good for anyone.
The latest confirmation of this “schizophrenia” is in some discontent created by a communication to the market made by the Antitrust on the network contract. An intelligent tool, made even more attractive by tax incentives, aimed at strengthening an excessively fragmented production structure. Objective declared by the legislator to help the small and medium-sized businesses to achieve greater innovative capacity and competitiveness on the market. On the basis of the network contract, several entrepreneurs can stipulate an agreement, committing themselves, on the basis of a common network programme, to collaborate in predetermined forms relating to the exercise of their businesses or to exchange information or services of an industrial, commercial, technical or even to jointly carry out one or more activities falling within the scope of their business.
In other times, the prediction of the "exchange of information on industrial, commercial and technical performance" would have been enough to make the Antitrust jump on its seat and force it to take pen and paper to tell the legislator that that provision violated competition. Precisely because the Antitrust is not dogmatic, it has chosen another path: it has published on its website a communication to the market which, going into the gist, goes like this: the tool is excellent, the purposes worthy, but remember that the competition rules they admit agreements only when they have a pro-competitive effect. Translated into practice, this means that contracts aimed at increasing the innovative capacity and competitiveness of companies are perfectly fine, contracts aimed at cartelizing prices or market shares are not suitable, and are at risk of antitrust sanctions. It was a communication in line with the choice of dialogue and confrontation with companies implemented by this institution in recent years, moreover solicited by some enlightened entrepreneurs who feared antitrust problems linked to network contracts. The alternative, in line with European rules, would have been to wait silently for the companies at the crossroads and sanction them in the event of violations of the competition law. In the name of a dogmatic vision that does not belong to us.
