Abstract

Regulation of the markets is intended to safeguard, in the long run, public interests and, in the short run to boost competition on the regulated markets, setting ex ante the behaviour of the market operators or the market's structure itself. Conversely, competition rules intervene, as a surgery operation, in order to correct and punish those market behaviours that may alter the market equilibrium, through a single or joint exploitation of market power, that threaten to damage consumers. This article tries to evaluate how far the reality is from this model, for the difficulty of Regulators in reducing their ex ante determinations in favour of general competition rules (or simply defining the timetable of this evolution) and the new trend of the Antitrust Authorities to increase their power to control ex ante the changes in the market structures in order to prevent those changes which can, in principle, facilitate collusion or abuses.