THE AUTHORITY ON THE WEB
PRESS RELEASE
Last August the Italian Competition Authority has opened its own Web site and since then the online information services have been accessed by an average of two hundred users per day (given the page structure, it means that the Web documents have been visited by an average of 50 users a day). Almost half of the queries comes from abroad, in particular from the US which accounts for over 12% of the total queries. Among the foreign countries, Belgium ranks second (1, 32%); these queries are likely to come nearly totally from the European Commission and the legal firms situated in Bruxelles. Italian queries account for 53% of the total queries.
The Authority has worked a mutual link with the US Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and with the electronic periodical Antitrust Policy, edited by Vanderbilt University. At the international level, the antitrust organizations that have established their presence on the Internet and offer online resources, in addition to the Italian Competition Authority, are the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice-Antitrust Division (US), the Office of fair Trading (UK) and the Bureau of Competition Policy (Canada).
With regards to the queried topics, the most frequently accessed archives available on the Authority's Web site are:
- Weekly Bulletin 12%
- Annual Report 11%
- Press releases 11%
- Related sites 11%
- Commission and Secretary General (c.v.) 10%
- National legislation 9%
- European community legislation 9%
- Structure and Role of the Authority 9%
- International Meeting 8%
- Code of conduct 6%
- Other 4%
As for the e-mail service, which started on April 1995, it has allowed for numerous exchanges of messages with subjects and organizations that are connected to the Internet. It is to be noted that the recent start of the experimental phase of the e-mail with the Directorate General for Competition (DG IV) of the European Commission as well as the Fourcom project, which is about to be realized, has allowed for a greater and more secure and confidential e-mail document exchange.
The Authority also receives complaints on alleged violations of the Competition Act by e-mail. In some cases, the Authority has initiated a proceeding or has carried out a preliminary examination of the complaint. If these complaints concern alleged misleading advertisement, the complainant is required to file the complaint by mail or by fax, since the signature of the complainant is a necessary requirement. The volume of e-mail messages has increased in these months, also as a result of a wider spread knowledge of the Authority's e-mail address (antitrust@agcm.it, which can be accessed directly on the location http://www.agcm.it). In the last period the Authority has received 3-4 messages per day.
The Authority has decided to translate a number of its Web pages in the English language, given that 50% of the queries come from abroad. Technical solutions are under consideration in order to allow anyone to access the public information stored in the Authority's local server (at the present time the Web site offers a selection of the most important decisions taken by the Authority since January 1995), both via the Internet services and via the cd-rom which are integrated with the online services.