Monitoring References to the Court of Justice of the European Union
Preliminary references are EU law's early-warning system: every reference is a dispute a national judge could not resolve alone. EU Law Radar reports them as they are lodged — the questions quoted verbatim — and follows each case through to judgment.
The Dutch competition authority fined Samsung for steering retailers' television prices. Samsung says a vertical restriction can only be 'by object' if it harms competition between brands, not just between its own dealers. The Netherlands' highest administrative court asks the Court of Justice whether intra-brand harm is enough.
Intel's €1.06 billion fine of 2009 was annulled in 2022 on the rebates; what survived were the 'naked restrictions' — payments to HP, Acer and Lenovo to delay or drop AMD-based products. The Commission re-fined those at €376 million in 2023, the General Court cut it to €237 million in December 2025, and Intel now appeals what is left.
The Digital Services Act lets the Commission bill very large platforms for the cost of supervising them, using a methodology it must lay down by delegated act. When it set Meta's and TikTok's fees it counted their users its own way, explained in an annex. The General Court annulled both decisions. The Commission appeals, saying an explanation is not a methodology.
Zalando told the Commission that 83 million people visit its store each month but that only 37% of what they see comes from third-party sellers — so only 31 million are 'recipients' of a platform. The Commission counted all of them. The General Court agreed. Zalando's appeal asks whether exposure to third-party content must be proved or may be presumed.
Amazon was designated a very large online platform under the Digital Services Act and lost its challenge in November 2025. It now tells the Court that a marketplace carries none of the 'systemic risks' the Act was written for, and that treating it like a social network breaches the Charter. The Commission has cross-appealed, saying the General Court should never have looked.
The Commission fined Qualcomm €242 million for selling baseband chipsets to Huawei and ZTE below cost to squeeze out Icera. The General Court trimmed the fine and upheld the rest. Qualcomm's seven-plea appeal is the Court's first chance in over a decade to say how predatory pricing is proved — and whether effects must be shown.
A Facebook user's name, gender, user ID and phone number turned up on the internet, scraped and published by a third party. The Landgericht Erfurt asks whether that bare fact — the loss of control over one's data, even briefly — is non-material damage under Article 82 of the GDPR, and whether it matters that most of the data were already public.
TikTok met every numerical threshold in the Digital Markets Act and was designated a gatekeeper in the Act's first wave. ByteDance says the presumptions can be rebutted and that the General Court made them impossible to rebut. The first DMA appeal to reach the Court of Justice will say how much a designated company may argue.
The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive bans calling a product 'free' if the consumer has to pay anything. Germany's consumer federation says Facebook charges in personal data. The Bundesgerichtshof asks the Court, in a single sentence, whether data and consent are a 'cost'.
A Hungarian publisher says Google's chatbot reproduced its articles — once when the model was trained, again when it answered. Google says a model that predicts the next word copies nothing. The first reference on generative AI and copyright asks the Court which of them is right.
The questions referred are quoted word-for-word from the official texts. Commentary is clearly separated from the record.
Each report links the authentic documents on CURIA and EUR-Lex by ECLI and CELEX number.
URLs cited in academic literature since 2012 do not change. Corrections are logged, never silently overwritten.