The World Trade Organization (WTO), created from the Uruguay Round from 1986 to 1994 and the GATT negotiations, was seen as the possible forum for an agreement on multilateral competition rules due to the broad membership and its effective dispute resolution mechanism. In 1996, the European Community proposed, at the WTO meeting in Singapore, to link competition rules within the WTO. The proposal was made on the basis of a recommendation report published in 1995 by a group appointed by the European Competition Commissioner. The WTO working group on the interaction between trade and competition policy, established at the Singapore meeting, published a number of reports between 1998 and 2001. At the WTO conference in Doha in 2001, the working group was asked to focus on less controversial issues within its framework. until the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancun in 2003. At the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference, an advanced proposal from the European Community was on the table (OA50). The proposal put forward contains the following elements: the commitment to fight against unjustifiable cartels; commitment to the principles of the WTO, namely transparency, procedural fairness and non-discrimination; technical assistance would be provided to developing and less developed countries; cooperation between agencies in the application of competition law would be voluntary; dispute settlement would apply to the first two commitments. At the conference, it became clear that although the scope of the WTO was limited to hard core cartels, there was no census of WTO members and, therefore, the WTO suspended the working group on the interaction between competition and trade policy and abandoned its proposed agenda. This was not the first...... middle of paper ......g competition authorities. Regarding harmonization, the RIC seeks gentle convergence by identifying best practices. The comparison shows that there are huge differences between these two approaches and therefore it is difficult to see or choose the best solution. The RIC is the newest network and evolves over time. It is therefore not certain that this network will direct competition rules in the future. There could be a multilateral agreement on competition law in the future, when there is less diversity between countries, and the RIC could accommodate this agreement, but would it then be desirable to separate competition from trade. Some might advocate separation, others might not, like Professor Fox. She writes here in her Doha Dom article: “free trade and free competition naturally go hand in hand, because they are based on sympathetic values..”