Unilateral Competition Policy and Standard-essential Patents

Industry standards often use patented technologies. For instance, telecom standards such as 3G and 4G rely on a large number of such ”standard-essential” patents. The owners of these potentially have considerable market power, since they can block access to the standards. The main regulatory response comes from national competition authorities, which seek to prevent this power from being exploited. The purpose of this project was to highlight how principles for international jurisdiction can be used to prevent international conflicts of interest in this area.