314 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM • Mergers: The Commission can either prohibit them, authorise them subject to conditions that eliminate or lessen the risk of anticompetitive effects resulting from the merger, or simply authorise the merger. • State aid: The Commission can prohibit specific support measures granted to companies and order Member States to recover any state aid that has been provided by them if it is incompatible with the proper functioning of competition in the Single Market. In the actual system of parallel enforcement, each competition authority can act independently, launch its own investigations and take decisions on competition. To this end, the Commission and NCAs cooperate closely through the European Competition Network (ECN) in order to determine which authority is best placed to conduct an investigation9. While the Commission is directly responsible for its own investigations, it also has the overall responsibility and necessary legal tools to ensure that all NCAs apply EU competition rules in a uniform manner. This ensures that the Commission is the key enforcer of EU competition rules. Finally, competition issues appear to fall between the main planks of competition rules, as it appears there is always a path that can be used to avoid being affected by rules restricting competition. In effect, and despite all the investigative powers of the Commission and the NCAs, we cannot avoid the fact that there is a real problem when it comes to interpreting the law on these matters. As stated above, competition is ruled on in only a few articles of the Union Treaty, which demands a great effort of interpretation. This situation often leads to court decisions in favour of the alleged offenders. A revision of the Law, introducing a straightforward method in how all the interpretation developments are brought to the discussion by the courts, Commission or the NCAs would help. 4.2. Design of market mechanisms Beginning from the point that existing rules on competition do not provide enough protection against abusive behaviours, the logical step forward is to try to establish new potential measures that protect competition, by basically working on the implementation of a new trading mechanism. There are several 9 By the end of 2017, this resulted in more than 2 000 investigations and over 1 000 decisions, with the Member State competition authorities being responsible for 85% of them.
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