The ninth meeting of the Multi-stakeholder Dialogue on Comparison Tools (MSDCT) Group of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Justice and Consumers was held on 1 February in Brussels.
Highlights of the meeting include:
i) Final discussion of the document on "Key Principles for Comparison Tools" ahead of its completion, using contributions submitted beforehand by the participants. 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 and completed for the MSDCT by Ipsos, Deloitte and London Economics in 2013;
ii) The exchange of information about how the various participants in the meeting (companies, consumer associations, regulators and ministries, among others) aim to abide by or enforce those principles.
The group's chair also indicated that those principles should be published by the EC when the guidelines for the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive are released, expected to occur in May 2016.
