European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Keynote speech of the Executive Vice President Ribera at the 23rd International Conference on Competition (IKK) Berlin, 12 March 2026 Thanks to you all. Good morning. I'm very happy to be here today. It is not what we expected. Of course, the world is not the same as when you met in 2024 and it's not even the same as the world that existed when you started to thin...
European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Keynote speech of the Executive Vice President Ribera at the 23rd International Conference on Competition (IKK) Berlin, 12 March 2026 Thanks to you all. Good morning. I'm very happy to be here today. It is not what we expected. Of course, the world is not the same as when you met in 2024 and it's not even the same as the world that existed when you started to think how to organise this gathering this year, or even as 10 days ago. Well things may happen at the highest speed. But we need to be ready to address whatever comes. And yes, we know that what we are witnessing is not only blood and suffering. The economy, the energy markets have reacted instantly. Gas prices jumped sharply. Oil benchmarks climbed again. And there is this uncertainty floating in the air. Many people in our societies, of course governments, corporates, are wondering how this may evolve and to what extent this could impact them. It is not new. We have seen this before. Yes, we know that geopolitical tensions translate immediately into the market and higher bills, inflationary pressure, uncertainty for business are things that are not good for anyone and that puts back pressure on the competition authorities and of course among the business players. So, we ask ourselves what this means for us. What does this mean for the competition community? How can we help to prevent additional damage? The deep transformation of our energy systems is a must in terms of competitiveness, in terms of affordability. It will impact directly the whole economy. But it may be the case that targeted emergency support that could be needed in this context, if tensions continue. So I could come with a simple statement. Our direction of travel is clear and independent and decarbonised European Union is key. Sticking to the general framing is important to ensure that reliability remains, that investors feel like taking the decisions to bet on our economy, and that households feel like they can support this deep transformation. And in terms of economic security, it matters not to have weakness connected to dependencies from abroad that go beyond certain limits. And yes, it is obvious that the transformation of our energy systems connects not only to the economy, it also matters to our citizens. And this was the reason why we came up with proposals last Tuesday in Strasbourg. In this turbulent context the question is: how we can ensure a smart and meaningful transformation, while addressing at the very same time a crisis and not forgetting one of our core goals, which is to prevent distortions in the Single Market. What type of support measures to address emergencies, what longer term measures to transform deeply our economy and make it more resilient. We are not there yet. But in case the need for support measures arises, we need to draw from the experience of the previous crisis. For the moment we have untapped state aid possibilities that Member States can still use to give relief to electricity prices of energy intensive users. And in that context, we cannot forget the core DNA of antitrust regulators and enforcers: to ensure the level playing field to prevent excessive market power and abuses of dominant positions, and to protect consumers and players in any given market. Europe has gone through several crisis in the last few years. It has been hard on citizens and companies. But as I said we can draw the experience from the previous recent crisis. In 2020 and 2022 we were confronted with the COVID pandemic, then with the Russian aggression against Ukraine and these events hit citizens and our societies very hard. The Commission reacted on several fronts. One key item that we did is that for each of these two crises we adopted the COVID temporary framework and the temporary crisis framework. In both cases, we had to react quickly and we enabled public support to business in need in order to preserve jobs and avoid that otherwise healthy companies were brought down. In both cases we adopted the temporary frameworks within a few weeks enabling Member States to provide necessary support while protecting the integrity of the Single Market. We also wanted to let companies and the private sector do their most to respond to the acute challenges of these crises. And we signalled that we welcomed cooperation that could ensure the supply and distribution of scarce products to all consumers. In fact, all competition authorities came together and issued a joint statement by the European Competition Network. We made clear that such cooperation measures were unlikely to be problematic under competition rules. And in case companies had doubts, we invited them to reach out to the Commission, EFTA surveillance authority or a national authority at any time for informal guidance and it was pretty helpful. But beyond crisis measures and our ability to react in emergencies, the world we live in today is not the same as the world we lived in a decade ago. That is why I was tasked with modernising the competition rule book to ensure that our rules are fit for purpose. And that is what we are trying to do with your help, with your ideas and with your experience. Allow me to comment on a few topics that have been in the agenda in these months. Sustainability as a key driver for competitiveness. Governments willing to favour this quick transformation of the economy performance. The first big deliverable in the modernisation agenda under this mandate was to adopt the Clean Industrial State Aid Framework in June 2025, following the Clean Industrial Deal and the Competitiveness compass. Why? Because we know sustainability and deep transformation of our industrial competitiveness requires speedy changes and Member States are willing to accelerate that change. And maybe markets were not ready to fix this issue at the highest speed. Those things are happening and this framework provides a stable framework for Member States to support decarbonisation, keeping under control any risk in terms of market fragmentation. It facilitates and accelerates investments that could modernise our economy and make it more competitive and resilient. At this time, we have approved aid for around 23 billion euros through schemes supporting renewable deployment and the decarbonisation of our industry. This reduces our dependency on volatile fossil fuels and contribute to affordable energy prices in the medium term. We learned in previous crises that this direction of travel was going to be important. This framework becomes even more relevant today. It was designed to support the transformation. But is it fit for providing answers to deep increases in energy prices in an emergency? This is a discussion that we will be having if the current crisis stays too long with us. Importantly, CISAF allows to give short term relief to the electricity bill of energy intensive users. Support should be transparent, fair and under competition rules. This is an important tool that can help transition to a more decarbonised energy mix and help the industry with high electricity price in the very short term while ensuring their transformation. And it is not the only thing that we have done. We also adopted revised ETS state aid guidelines, to ensure that those sectors being particularly affected could count on support to cover the cost of indirect carbon intensity embedded in the electricity systems. We extended the number of sectors that can benefit from these supports and increase the aid intensity up to 80 % for the most energy intensive sectors. This is an additional tool for Member States to temporarily help the industry. It was adopted before Christmas. No Member State has yet made use of that. But let us not lose sight of the medium-term goal. Industry is key for prosperity and the creation of wealth as much as high quality clean transport for citizens. This is why we will be adopting guidelines and a block exemption regulation to help steer public finance to sustainable modes of transportation. With our rules we want to ensure that Member States and regions transition faster to rail and water transport and to enable investments into modern transportation infrastructures, fleet renewal, digitalisation and interoperability. Again, ensuring that we count on a common, predictable and transparent framework. As mentioned before, responding to change relies not only on public intervention, it needs to rely mainly on the private initiative – and there are many different players willing to bet on sustainability. This is why we took note of their demand to support cooperation between companies w, in particular where they genuinely want to contribute to sustainability and understand that cooperation can help to a greater success. In July 2025 we issued the first informal guidance letter on a sustainability agreement. This guidance served to support port terminal operators for jointly purchasing and setting technical specifications for certain container handling equipment thereby accelerating the shift from diesel to electric equipment. This contributes to reducing CO2 emissions and to ensuring resilience. We are mindful that cooperation can also increase resilience. The Commission has been carrying out a fact-finding exercise on the need and means for greater industry cooperation in procurement, recycling and the reuse of critical raw materials and we are assessing the feedback that we have received. Our doors are wide open to such initiatives and where relevant we are ready to provide individual guidance. It is not only about new forms of cooperation. It is also about new areas for enforcement. This means looking into emerging and fast-moving markets including artificial intelligence where competition policy is already being tested in very concrete ways. AI challenges some of our traditional assumptions. At its best AI can improve the daily lives of citizens, accelerate innovation and supercharge productivity of our industries, economies and use of the infrastructures. But at its worst it can entrench corporate power concentration, undermine media plurality and our creative communities. It can create real dangers for our children and democracy.We saw this risk clearly with the recent issues around AI generated fake images. AI as such is not where the problem lies.Questions arise in relation to who controls the key inputs, data, computing capacity, cloud services, access to users increasingly shape market outcomes. This is why we are looking at the entire AI stack, not only the final applications like chat GPT but also the underlying models that power them, the data the models are trained on and the cloud infrastructure and energy sources which are their foundation. Effective competition all along these supply chains is essential to ensure that AI driven markets do not tip irreversibly.This requires vigilance and fast and decisive enforcement where needed. In September 2024 we set out potential competition risks in an AI policy brief.We are now seeing some risk emerge in practice. One risk concerns exclusion from key distribution channels to reach users where dominant platforms favour their own AI services on their own channels. Rivals may be excluded before the markets mature.This logic underpins our ongoing proceedings concerning Meta and WhatsApp. We cannot allow big tech players to leverage their dominance of the past to dictate which AI services European citizens can access or who gets to bring innovation to the market. We were concerned that Meta's ban on third party AI assistant from accessing WhatsApp could cause irreparable harm to that rapidly evolving market. And we were not the only competition authority worrying. This is why we have been working to quickly impose interim measures. We issued a statement of objections in February. Last week Meta announced that it could reverse its decision to exclude third party AI chatbots from WhatsApp but it will start charging a fee. This shows the importance of swift enforcement. We are now carefully assessing if this policy change has an impact on the need for the Commission to act urgently.And sometimes our analysis and experience tell us that competition policy requires new instruments. Our findings on fast digital markets informed the Digital Markets Act. Across these markets the challenge is consistent. DMA is clearly the enforcement priority for me. We have opened a number of new cases in this mandate. For instance, three cloud cases and Google cases. Further, while we welcome global competition in the internal market, we do not want this competition to be shaped by subsidies. This is why we adopted the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, closing a regulatory gap. Member state subsidies were always subject to close scrutiny under state aid control. Thanks to the foreign subsidies regulation subsidies granted by non-European governments no longer go unchecked. It ensures a level playing field in the Single Market. It keeps Europe open for business, but we need to protect competition on the merits. Both the DMA and the FSR are undergoing a review this year. We conducted public consultations last year and these are feeding into our work. The review reports are due in May and July respectively. And since we are talking about reviews, perhaps some of the audience is particularly interested in the most famous review: the new merger guidelines. Merger guidelines that intend to contribute to strengthening Europe's competitiveness. We want to help European companies to scale up in a pro-competitive way to support growth and unlock greater investments in Europe. But at the very same time we know that the core objective of merger control is there to remain. Excessive consolidation weakens incentives to compete and invest. Mergers should not undermine choice and affordability for business and citizens. Still a new theme of the guidelines will be that merger control has a role to play in ensuring a Single Market that is resilient to serious shocks. This is increasingly important in the world of today. Our new guidelines will help companies understand when a merger can be good for resilience or whether it may be riskier. This could particularly be the case in global markets defined by dominant non-EU suppliers. A merger can enable a European alternative or increase European firms negotiating power towards non- European suppliers. But mergers can harm resilience where they reduce the number of suitable suppliers of critical inputs. Resilience can be at risk because resilience comes from diverse markets, from open supply chains that are sourced from multi sourcing possibilities. Merger control avoids choke points that can be breaking points. Another key element of the review is a more robust treatment of dynamic effects. Both dynamic harm and dynamic efficiencies. Innovation and investment matter for competitiveness. They will feature prominently in our assessment. The guidelines will enable a more forward-looking analysis across all type of mergers. After 20 years we are modernising the merger guidelines to make them fit for the future. We will publish draft guidelines in the coming weeks and we are looking forward to your contributions. In short, in addressing the challenges that we face we look at all ways competition policy can play a role and support broader goals. Power, markets, democracies and innovation have always been connected and connect also to competition policy. Yet there are limits. The Merger Guidelines can lay out procompetitive scale, to be found for instance in cross-border M&A. And competitive assessments can account for non-price parameters, such as quality and sustainability. But we cannot engage in wishful thinking. We must be cautious with labels like “global market” or “out-of-market efficiencies”: we do not want to force competition authorities into imagining competitors that do not exist, or into brokering trade- offs that they are not equipped to make. Put differently: competition policy must reach out but it cannot overreach. In particular the merger guidelines cannot create a Single Market. This is why the Commission is working on a One Europe One Market roadmap. Market integration may be the right answer for some of the problems raised in recent months. Similarly, the Commission recently adopted the Industrial Accelerator Act proposal, intending to increase demand for low carbon European made technologies and products including clean technologies. Competition enforcement can complement political priorities but parliaments decide on political priorities and trade-offs. So, in these uncertain geopolitical times I wish for competition policy that we know is principled, that we work to modernise and that we acknowledge is very relevant, but complementary. Thanks a lot and I count on you. SPEECH/26/602
Speech Brief