Competition law in the quasi-liberalized postal service market: An overview

Postal services in the European Union have been liberalized through three postal directives, namely, 97/67/EC, 2002/39/EC and 2008/6/EC as per the Green paper, which emphasises the necessity of the liberalization of postal services for the development of the single market and the promotion of socio-economic development. Nevertheless, the realisation of this transition is questionable. Although these directives, to remove all barriers for new entrants, have established the necessary legal framework, formerly monopolised national postal operators have retained their dominant positions to a large extent and attempted to abuse it. Therefore, the implementation of competition law provisions plays an important role in the liberalization process. This article seeks to discuss how far postal services have advanced in terms of their liberalization under recent competition law judgments issued against national postal operators such as La Poste and Deutsche Post, by considering the Universal Postal Union (UPU)’s postal development reports as well as arguing the counter example of the US position.