EU Directive 2019/1 defines cartel this way:

“(11) ‘cartel’ means an agreement or concerted practice between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as, but not limited to, the fixing or coordination of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, including in relation to intellectual property rights, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets and customers, including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports or anti-competitive actions against other competitors;”

“(12) ‘secret cartel’ means a cartel, the existence of which is partially or wholly concealed;”

A cartel is quite harmful to consumers as I understand it, and as that definition suggests. But I find no prohibition on cartels in EU Directive 2019/1. There is a huge amount of text about giving leniency to secret carels. Leniency implies there is a prohibition to begin with. The anti-competition prohibition seems to be wholly in the TFEU arts.101—102, though nothing about cartels specifically. That’s also just strictly regulating cross-border competition. So IIUC, the EU is unconcerned with anti-competitive scenarios falling wholly within a member state, correct?

I’m ultimately trying to work out whether this trend of ATM cartels is lawful. It seems to have started in NL but the shitshow is spreading out from there. I get the impression the ATM cartels would not be considered cross-border anti-competition, thus not an EU concern. From there, it’s down to just national anti-competition law, correct?

Why I give a shit

I visited a city where 100% of the ATMs were owned by a single ATM cartel. The machines rejected my perfectly valid card and it gave a bullshit reason. The machine gave a vague lie. The card works in other ATMs, just not that of the cartel that dominated that whole city. I was legitimately afraid to try more than two ATMs because failed withdrawal attempts themselves become a red flag for banks’ shitty AI fraud algos. Three failed attempts and the ATM might confiscate the card, or my bank might cut it off from all transactions. So it’s sensible to make every attempt at a different kind of machine to not waste the precious few attempts that are tolerated by the skiddish algos coded by those without accountability for DoS errors.

Do we have to eat this shit? Do I have to accept that I can never get cash from an ATM in that city now that the ATMs are all pawned? Or is there recourse?

Incompetent engineering is just one example of why I give a shit. Another example is that I do not want one single giant entity to track my banking and totally control my access to money. Facebook users are happy to be centrally surveilled but I am not.

If their shitty AI fraud algos falsely trigger, I obviously would like a 2nd opinion from a different ATM owner. Competition law should ensure that, I would think, but I’m not finding it.