Da Illumina-Grail a NVIDIA/Run:AI. Nuove prospettive e nuove sfide per il controllo delle concentrazioni = From Illumina-Grail to NVIDIA/Run:AI. New perspectives and new challenges for merger control

This paper looks at the call-in powers on below-thresholds mergers of the Italian Antitrust Authority, in the light of the European Court of Justice pivotal decision of 3 September 2024 in the Illumina/Grail case. National rules and how they are interpreted resonate across the EU legal framework as the recent NVIDIA/Run:AI case shows. The author isolates the parts of the Court decision that address the general trade-off between predictability and effectiveness in merger control attributing to legal certainty a “cardinal importance”, and proposes a reading of the newly introduced Italian rules that, accordingly, assigns precedence to legal certainty over the goal of effectively preventing restrictions of competitions. In doing so he analyses call-in devices in the broader context of merger control regimes and the current debate about reforming merger rules with a view of filling up “merger gaps”.