Conflicts And Coordination Between Antitrust Law And Industry Regulation In Public Utilities

Public utilities have a special status in the national economy and social development,which makes the public utility monopoly particularly concerned about.In April 2016 SAIC issued a notice requiring all the provinces to carry out enforcement activities on public utilities' behavior of restricting and excluding competition,which trigged the dissertation's concerns about public utility monopoly.Natural monopoly and social welfare are the two most basic characteristics of public utilities and also the basis and reasons of applying antitrust immunity and causing conflicts between antitrust law and industry regulation.However,the nature of the combination of civil subject and administrative subject of public utilities in China adds obstacles to analyzing the behavior of public utilities.In addition,the level of legislation and the ambiguity of the terminology of industry regulation is also a matter of consideration in the analysis of the conflicts.At the theoretical level,the conflicts between antitrust law and industry regulation have not received much attention.In practice,law enforcement agencies and the judiciary also tend to ignore the rationality of industry regulation and emphasize the priority of antitrust law.The dissertation is intended to illustrate the complexity of the conflict problem by combining theory carding and case analysis,thinking that the existence of industry regulation has its own rationality and when the conflict occurs the antitrust law should not take precedence over industry regulation for granted,but the two institutions should be combined with specific cases through rigorous analysis to determine whether the case should be exempted from the application of antitrust law.The dissertation is divided into five parts.The first chapter starts from the research object,introducing the concept,features and monopoly performance of public utilities and helping the readers form a preliminary impression of monopoly behavior of public utilities and then analyzes the relationship between administrative monopoly and public utility monopoly putting forward the dissertation's definition of “administrative monopoly” and the dual attribute of public utility monopoly.Thus,through the introduction and analysis of public utility,public utility monopoly and related administrative monopoly in Chapter 1,the scope of the study is defined for the following research on the conflict theory and case analysis.The second chapter focuses on the conflict theory of antitrust law and industry regulation.First,it summarizes the five forms of conflicts,including the conflict of contents,the conflict of legal hierarchy,the conflict of the identification of anti-competitive behavior,the conflict of relief and the conflict of application.Secondly,it analyzes the two main causes of conflicts – the historical stage of social development and the differences of their legislative purposes.After combining the basic concepts and the theory of conflicts,the third chapter chooses a case from the urban public transport field to make specific analysis of the conflicts from the court judgment,administrative punishment,improper determination of the nature of the public utilities' behavior and the obstacle to analyzing their behavior,reflecting the complexity of conflict resolution in practice.The fourth chapter focuses on the settlement of the conflicts.The solutions from the EU and the United states are introduced and through combining the relevant laws and regulation in China,it finds that China's current legislation does not provide a solution for the conflicts of antitrust law and industry regulation,which results in the need to learn from other countries.Then,on the basis of analyzing the merits and demerits of respective schemes,it thinks that China should choose the US approach and tries to apply the approach to the upper case.Finally,on the basis of the above four chapters,the fifth chapter puts forward some suggestions on the solution of the conflicts between antitrust law and industry regulation in public utilities and thinks that China's antitrust law enforcement is used to neglect the rationality and legitimacy of industry regulation.The conflicts have not received due attention.To resolve the problem of conflict,we can improve from the following aspects: first,perfecting the industry legislation to give industry regulation the legitimacy at the legal hierarchy level;secondly,giving explicit immunities to the industries which show obvious conflicts and can only benefit from applying industry regulation during industrial legislation;thirdly,establishing the mechanism of implied immunity and improve the antitrust litigation system;finally,clearing the legal status of public utilities to wipe out the obstacle to analyzing the nature of public utilities' behavior.