TT’s acquisition of Retriever

The Swedish Competition Authority has decided not to take any action concerning Telegrambyrå AB’s (TT) acquisition of Retriever AB. This means that the Swedish Competition Authority will not investigate the acquisition further.

TT acquired Retriever, a media monitoring company, in August 2009. The acquisition was not subject to a duty to notify, but the Swedish Competition Authority nonetheless requested a notification under the Competition Act as there was a risk that the acquisition could have negative effects in the media monitoring sector.

In May 2010, the Swedish Competition Authority decided to commence a special investigation regarding the effects of the acquisition. This investigation has now been concluded and it has been found that the acquisition will not significantly impede the existence or development of effective competition. For this reason, no action will be taken regarding the acquisition and it will not be investigated further.

In the course of the investigation, The Swedish Competition Authority has examined:

• TT’s possibility of denying Retriever’s competitors access to newsletters produced by TT; and
• the risk of TT’s main owners, Bonnier and Schibsted, through the newspapers Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Dagens Industri, Svenska Dagbladet and Aftonbladet, being able to deny Retriever’s competitors access to digital press clippings with the aim of harming Retriever’s competitors within media monitoring.

The investigation conducted by the Swedish Competition Authority shows that TT’s possibility and incentive to deny Retriever’s competitors access to TT material is very limited. The payment model used by TT is not of such a nature that it reduces the incentives for Retriever’s competitors to compete and the kind of linking (reference linking) that media monitoring companies use does not constitute a form of copyright control. TT has therefore little chance of preventing other media monitoring companies from referring their customers to the newspapers’ web editions, which include material from both TT and other sources.

Nor does the Swedish Competition Authority’s investigation support the view that it would be a profitable strategy to impede the access of Retriever’s competitors to digital press clippings from the newspapers owned by Bonnier and Schibsted.