This book provides a comprehensive examination of the interaction between Services of General Economic Interest (SGEI) and EU competition law, covering in particular Article 106 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and state aid rules. It also takes the telecommunications, postal service and transport sectors as case studies, taking into account the technological, economic and political backgrounds to these sectors.

The area of SGEI has undergone fundamental developments over the past three decades and the most recent changes in the Lisbon Treaty, recognizing SGEI as a shared value and granting explicit competence to the EU, mark its constitutional significance. The key issue is how to balance economic values underlying competitive markets and non-economic public service values such as universal access to essential services. The essence of the question is the relationship between the market and the state. This controversial issue is addressed through acritical analysis of a number of landmark EU Court judgments and Commission decisions over the decades.

Offering a clear appreciation of the evolution of the EU regulatory framework on SGEI that lays out the limits and boundaries within which the Member States define, organize and fund SGEI, the book is particularly aimed at academics with a research interest in the interaction between public services and EU competition law, but as it also demonstrates clearly how the application of EU competition law has transformed the public utilities sectors, it will be of interest to law makers, legal professionals and policy makers as well.

Dr. Lei Zhu is a Research Associate at the Institute of International Law at Wuhan University in Wuhan, China. He studied at the Institute for Competition & Procurement Studies of the Bangor University Law School in Wales, United Kingdom, where he obtained his PhD in law in 2015.

Clarifies the controversy surrounding SGEI by careful analysis of the landmark case law spanning decades Offers a clear picture of the evolution of the EU regulatory framework on SGEI Explains the mechanisms set up by the EU to enable the provision of SGEI without distorting market competition Compares the approaches adopted by different sectors taking into account their technological, economic and political backgrounds

Autorentext
Lei Zhu, PhD., is a Professor in the School of Information Science and Engineering at Shandong Normal University. He received his B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Wuhan University of Technology in 2009 and Huazhong University Science and Technology in 2015, respectively. He was also previously a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Zhu has co-/authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, such as ACM SIGIR, ACM MM, IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TIP, IEEE TKDE, and ACM TOIS. He won ACM SIGIR 2019 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, ADMA 2020 Best Paper Award, ACM China SIGMM Rising Star Award. His research interests are in the area of big data mining and large-scale multimedia content analysis and retrieval. Jingjing Li, PhD., is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). He received his B.Eng., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from UESTC in 2010, 2013 and 2015, respectively. He has co-/authored morethan 70 peer-reviewed papers, such as IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TIP, IEEE TKDE, CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, IJCAI and ACM Multimedia. He won Excellent Doctoral Dissertation award of Chinese Institute of Electronics in 2018. His research interests are in the area of domain adaptation and zero-shot learning. Zheng Zhang, PhD., is a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science & Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Applied Technology from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2018. He has published over 150 technical papers in prestigious journals and conferences, such as IEEE TPAMI, IJCV, IEEE TIP, IEEE TNNLS, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ACM MM, AAAI, and IJCAI. He has received the 2019 Young Outstanding Research Achievement Award of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI) and was also a recipient of the "Honorable Mentioned Award" from ACM Multimedia Asia 2021 and the "Best Paper Award" from International Conference on Smart Computing 2014. His research interests include machine learning, computer vision, and multimedia analytics.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. SGI: An EU Expression of State Functions.- Chapter 3. The Grant of Exclusive Rights under Article 106.- Chapter 4. Application of State Aid Rules to SGEI Funding.- Chapter 5. Universal Service Obligation in Telecommunications.- Chapter 6. Services of General Economic Interest in the Postal Sector.- Chapter 7. Service of General Economic Interest in Transport.- Chapter 8. Conclusions.- Table of Treaties, Legislation, Decisions, Cases and Soft Law Documents.- Bibliography.- Index.