On The Bottleneck Monopoly Law Regulation

Bottleneck monopoly is the conduct of the manufacturers which own dominant position because of holding the bottleneck facilities. The aims of the conduct are to maintain or enhance the behavior's monopoly position and restrict other competitors. Bottleneck monopoly includes two constituent elements. One is enterprises which own dominant position because of holding the bottleneck facilities. The other is conducts of restricting other competitors. For example, they will take superhigh price of connecting the bottleneck facilities or refuse to be connected. Bottleneck monopoly can be classified to different types, such as individual and collective, direct and indirect, obvious and implicit, public and personal, landscape orientation and portrait. This paper divided the foreign laws about regulation of bottleneck monopoly into three different kinds. The first legislative pattern includes the specific provision, embodying that bottleneck monopoly is one of the regulative object in the anti-monopoly law. The second pattern is that the law embodies the regulative object-- refuse to deal, and makes the bottleneck monopoly into the range of it. The third pattern includes the abstract provision. This paper divided the pattern of cognizant agency of regulating the bottleneck monopoly into three kinds. The first pattern is that all of the bottleneck monopoly guarded by the governmental supervising department; The second pattern is that all of the bottleneck monopoly guarded by the anti-trust law enforcement agency; The third pattern is that the governmental supervising department and the anti-trust law enforcement agency coordinate to deal with the bottleneck monopoly. To judge the illegal problem of bottleneck monopoly, we must focus our attention on the purpose and effect of it. And then we can apply illegal pe se and rule of reason respectively. Since bottleneck monopoly has existed double characters of being promotion and limitation with competition, foreign laws prescribe some bottleneck monopolies being exempt from the anti-monopoly law. However, with the people keep more and more knowledge of bottleneck monopoly, reduce or cancel exempt system is the trend. Nowadays, in China, the phenomena of bottleneck monopoly have appeared in many industries. Further, they mainly include the administration power. In the aspect of legislation, there still exists no provision on bottleneck monopoly. So, the paper points out that we should enhance the work of legislation, especially the legislation of antitrust law. In the further, we should adopt the appropriate lawmaking body, define the constituent elements and exempt system, setup a reasonable department of regulating bottleneck monopoly, perfect the system of the sanction of the bottleneck monopoly.