Despite being standard and essentially fixed agreements, getting them approved before transferring data will be both a financial and administrative burden.
Economists generally agree that horizontal price-fixing agreements are bad for consumers.
Horizontal price-fixing agreements are also illegal under European Union (EU) competition law, where they are similarly subject to so-called hard-core restrictions.
The inquiry into price-fixing agreements, which began as early as January 2000, has involved authorities worldwide and resulted in more than $1.6 billion in fines since 2011.
In addition, there have been some concerns about the per se prohibition of horizontal price-fixing agreements in contexts in which it is difficult for consumers to judge the quality of goods or services on their own.
"The new regulation cuts back this bureaucracy and allows the commission to focus its attention on these cartel and price-fixing agreements that are truly harmful to competition," said Mario Monti, the European Union's competition commissioner.
Examples of horizontal price-fixing agreements include agreements to adhere to a price schedule or range; to set minimum or maximum prices; to advertise prices cooperatively or to restrict price advertising; to standardize terms of sale such as credits, markups, trade-ins, rebates, or discounts; and to standardize the package of goods and services included in a given price.
"Such maximum price-fixing agreements create the risk that the maximum prices will become minimum or uniform prices," the department said in a business review letter signed Oct. 1, 1993, by Anne K. Bingaman, then the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division.
A long-held tenant of antitrust law is that vertical price fixing (an agreement between the manufacturer and the retailer to sell a product at a specific price) is often illegal.
They also staff the country's 271 dispute-settling industrial tribunals (known as prud'hommes councils) and fix national agreements on wages and working conditions.
