Brussels: The European Commission adopted its first full Guidelines on exclusionary abuse on 3 September 2026, setting out how it will apply Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to dominant companies that shut rivals out of a market. The adoption closed a three-year review that began with a call for evidence in March 2023.
The new text retires the 2008 enforcement priorities guidance, amended in 2023, which the Commission had always presented as a statement of where it would spend its attention rather than a statement of what the law required. Practitioners treated it as law regardless. The Guidelines end that awkwardness by describing the legal test itself, drawn from the case law of the Court of Justice and the General Court and from two decades of Commission decisions.
Structure carries most of the weight here. The Commission walks through dominance, then asks whether the conduct departs from competition on the merits, then asks whether it produces or is capable of producing exclusionary effects. A dominant firm can still justify conduct objectively, and the Guidelines keep efficiency defences alive, though the burden of substantiating them sits squarely with the company.
What changes in practice is the evidentiary temperature. The Commission sorts conduct into categories according to how readily harm can be inferred. Naked restrictions and exclusivity arrangements attract a presumption that is hard to rebut. Pricing conduct such as predation and margin squeeze still turns on cost benchmarks and an as-efficient-competitor analysis. Tying, self-preferencing and refusals to supply sit in between, and the Guidelines explain what evidence the Commission expects to see before it treats effects as established.
Lawyers reading the text for clients in concentrated markets will find the target audience obvious. Digital platforms, telecoms operators, energy suppliers, pharmaceutical originators, financial market infrastructure, ports and grid owners all sit in sectors where a single firm routinely clears the dominance threshold. For them the question is rarely whether Article 102 applies but which category their commercial strategy falls into.
The Guidelines do not touch the Digital Markets Act, and the Commission is careful to say so. The DMA imposes obligations in advance on a short list of designated gatekeepers. Article 102 reaches every dominant firm in every market the DMA does not name, and it reaches gatekeepers too for conduct the DMA leaves untouched. Anyone expecting the DMA to have absorbed exclusionary abuse enforcement will be disappointed.
National authorities matter as much as Brussels. Under Regulation 1/2003 the competition agencies of all 27 member states apply Article 102 alongside the Commission, and most national courts look to Commission guidance when they interpret equivalent domestic provisions. Cypriot, Irish and Greek regulators have already signalled that they will read their own abuse rules through the new framework, which means the Guidelines will shape cases the Commission never opens.
Business groups had lobbied for a document that narrowed enforcement, and they did not get one. The framework is more explicit than its predecessor, but explicitness cuts both ways, and several passages give the Commission room to act on conduct the 2008 guidance had effectively parked. Read the Commission’s own announcement of the Guidelines alongside its standing Article 102 legislation page and the ambition is plain enough.
The real test arrives with the first decision that cites the Guidelines and the first appeal that challenges them. Guidelines bind the Commission, not the courts, and the Luxembourg judges will decide in their own time whether this framework survives contact with litigation.
