Adaptive Behavioural Remedies and the Regulatory Turn in Antitrust Enforcement

This article examines the expanding role of behavioural remedies in competition law enforcement and the institutional tensions this creates between antitrust and regulation. The difficulty arises when remedies are expected not only to bring unlawful conduct to an end, but also to restore competitive conditions, preserve contestability, or prevent market tipping over time. Building on a typology of remedy design, the article identifies a continuum ranging from one-off injunctions to positive obligations whose implementation extend over time and increasingly resemble regulatory intervention. In dynamic markets, rigid remedies may quickly become ineffective or counterproductive. Yet remedies that remain open to ongoing discretionary revision risk turning competition authorities into de facto regulators. The article therefore argues for a bounded form of adaptability: behavioural remedies should be revisable only within predefined substantive and procedural limits, linked to the original theory of harm. By distinguishing bounded adaptability from open-ended flexibility, the article clarifies the frontier between competition law enforcement and regulatory governance. In doing so, it contributes to current debates on the proper institutional scope of antitrust.