74The referring court also states that, by neutralising competition between the two card payment systems at issue in the main proceedings as regards the aspect of the cost represented by the interchange fees, the MIF Agreement could have had the result of intensifying competition between those systems in other respects. In particular, the referring court observes that both the Competition Authority’s decision and the appeal on a point of law brought before the referring court are based on the premiss that the features of the products offered by Visa and MasterCard are substantially the same. The referring court points out that those features may have varied over the period in which the anticompetitive conduct complained of in the present instance would have occurred. According to that court, setting the interchange fees at a uniform level may have triggered competition in relation to the other features, transaction conditions and pricing of those products.
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