During the last few years the application of EC antitrust law has been subject to a number of changes, aiming at giving a greater role to economic analysis. This is leading to the abandonment of the traditional ordoliberal inspiration of EC competition law. This paper explores how justi ed is this change. In particular it argues that economic analysis provides di erent views of how competition works and thet it may a ect the application of antitrust at di erent stages. From this point of view a more economic approach is not necessarily incompatible with a reformed ordoliberal paradigm. What appears incompatible is an approach which substitutes eciency for competition. Such an approach has gained a role in the US antitrust, but its extension to the EC legal context is bound to produce a number of problems, and to lead to results di erent from the desired ones.