The Competition Act of 1998 did not arrive as a technical reform. It was conceived as part of a broader project of economic restructuring — an attempt to use competition policy to address concentrated market power inherited from a particular economic and political history, and to do so through institutions designed for that work. The institutional architecture, with its separation between the Commission, the Tribunal and the Appeal Court, was a deliberate choice, not a matter of administrative convenience.
Almost three decades on, the institutional architecture has settled, and the jurisprudence has developed. The Tribunal has produced a substantial body of merger analysis and prohibited-practice findings. The Appeal Court has refined the standards of review. The Constitutional Court has spoken on the limits of administrative penalties. What was once a novel system is now a mature one.
That maturity has, however, produced its own questions. The original Act envisioned competition policy as part of an integrated economic strategy. The relationship between competition enforcement and industrial policy was always intended to be one of complementarity rather than tension. In practice, that relationship has had to be worked out through cases, not through a sustained policy conversation.
The result is an architecture that performs its core technical functions well but is under-supported at the level of policy coherence. Merger conditions have become an unintended vehicle for delivering objectives that the framers might have housed elsewhere. The treatment of public-interest considerations, while constitutionally proper, has stretched the institutional capacity of the Tribunal. The question is whether the next stage of the Act's evolution lies in further procedural refinement, or in a more deliberate engagement with the policy ambition the Act was originally designed to serve.