Thank you for that.
It's quite an industry now for competition agencies around the world. After a law has been implemented, they have to come out with a bunch of guidelines to help explain to businesses how at least the authority plans to implement the law until courts tell it to do something differently. Guidelines can be extremely useful at providing guidance—the lawyers on the panel should maybe speak to this—to clients who are wondering whether their behaviour is appropriate and whether a merger is appropriate. Guidelines have an advantage: They can be constantly updated with new information and new techniques for, say, evaluating the effects of mergers as they come along. You can blend them into new guidelines. If we're introducing into law something as messy as a market definition and the associated market shares of concentration, given that we know how messy it is, my preference would be to put them in guidelines where they don't carry quite the same weight.
Cases won't be won or lost based on what a guideline says the market shares are or should be. However, that still provides a lot of guidance for firms when they come into the bureau to see whether the bureau is going to be nervous about a particular situation, and that can start a discussion. Then, if it is litigated, the focus can remain on the expected effects of the transaction.
I hope that's helpful.