The Relatedlegal Issues Of China’s Broadband Monopoly And Development

Since "Anti-monopoly law" was promulgated three years ago, few typical cases in the area of antitrust have appeared, but the situation seems to be changed wholly by a report from CCTV in the November9,2011. The report said:Recently, The National Development and Reform Commission has launched an antitrust investigation into China Telecom and China Unicom for the issue of broadband access;if the facts prove to be true, the two operators may be sentenced to hundreds of millions to billions of huge fine. The news made a big splash, the move touched off a public uproar from all walks of life, they said:"the sword of Damocles" of "antitrust laws" is hanging on the top of the heads of the central enterprises,"The first China’s anti-monopoly case" has turned out. Based on the importance of the case, with the combination of the legal system related to the macroeconomic regulation and the antitrust measures on the level of broadband access taken by the government, this article proceeds from the understanding of the broadband market’s status quo, tries to do some researches on the legal issues related to broadband monopoly, with expectation of exploring and discovering some basic rules which should be followed by the broadband market and broadband development and establishing a matching regulation system.This article is divided into five parts:The first part introduces the background of the broadband antitrust investigation, analyzes the causes of the event and illuminates the broadband development status and trend, which paves a way for understanding the thought line of the article; The second part describes the forms of broadband monopoly, analyzes the causes of and the rationality of the broadband monopoly, and clarifies that "any monopoly should be against " is a public misunderstanding; The third part explains " whether there is a phenomenon of price discrimination in the ISP access market,"and" whether the current end-user rates and charges are reasonable ", hoping to restore the true colors of the current broadband monopoly; The forth part summarizes the problems of the current regulation system of the broadband development, demonstrates that it should be understood that the broadband development of our country lags behind that of the developed countries; The fifth part displays my thoughts on the broadband monopoly and development, and comes up with such new ideas as the "1+1+1" regulation mode and reforming telecommunications industry further, designs a all-dimensional regulation system which involves the normative operation, effective regulation, high-speed development and sustainable evolution of our country’s broadband.