The eighth meeting of the Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue on Comparison Tools (MSDCT) group of the European Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Justice and Consumers was held last 26 March in Brussels.
Highlights of the meeting include the following:
i) the presentation by Florence Weill from the General Directorate of Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control of the French example with respect to the legislative process in the scope of transparency and trustworthiness of price comparison tools;
ii) the presentation given by Sophie Ridoux of the EC regarding guidelines about the Unfair Business Practices Directive and the relationship to price comparison tools;
iii) discussion of the preliminary version of key principles to apply in comparison tools prepared by the EC. Those principles were determined based on the study on the coverage, functioning and consumer use of comparison tools and third-party verification schemes for such tools developed for the MSDCT by Ipsos, Deloitte and London Economics.
The next step will be for the MSDCT to gather written opinions on the preliminary version of the key principles with a view to producing the final version.
