Research On Competition Law And Regulation Of International Shipping Monopoly

The manifestation of international shipping monopoly,pursuant to the organizational characteristics,can be divided into Liner Conferences,Shipping Negotiation Agreements,Shipping Consortia and Shipping Alliances.Based on the three substantive systems of the anti-monopoly law,shipping monopoly can still be uniformly defined as monopoly agreement,business concentration and abuse of market dominant position.Current shipping market,as a transnational market,makes shipping monopoly have international influence.In the late 19 th century,in order to deal with the monopoly in the era of liner conferences,the international community tried to regulate shipping monopoly at the level of international law by concluding the Convention on the Code of Conduct of Liner Conferences and issuing the memorandum of common measures and competition policy report,but the results were unsatisfactory.Since the 21 st century,the power of liner associations has gradually declined,and the international shipping market has formed a monopoly pattern with shipping alliance as the core.It is true that the shipping alliance is conducive to the realization of economies of scale and the optimization of resource allocation,but it also brings challenges to the competitive order of the shipping market and the anti-monopoly law enforcement of various countries.In this context,the 2002 OECD Report pointed out that granting the privilege of collective immunity to liner associations failed to improve economic efficiency and is not conducive to safeguarding the interests of shippers.Subsequently,the dispute over the preservation and abolition of the exemption system of agreement organizations such as shipping alliance intensified.At present,the EU only retains the exemption for shipping alliances,and turns to the general competition law to regulate other shipping organizations such as liner associations.The United States has already adopted the regulation mode of shipping monopoly based on shipping law,a special industrial law,to diminish the market risk brought by monopoly through all-round supervision.The different modes of EU and the United States on regulating shipping monopoly provide two modes for countries to deal with this international problem: the regulation path of general competition law and the adjustment method of special industrial law.On the one hand,the common method of global governance of shipping monopoly requires all countries in the international community to improve and perfect the institutional rules of domestic shipping competition law,continuing to give full play to the supervision of anti-monopoly law enforcement agencies.On the other hand,it also requires all countries to work together to solve the international shipping anti-monopoly problems such as shipping alliance through the exchange and cooperation of anti-monopoly law enforcement.In view of this,when dealing with the shipping monopoly problems such as the "P3 Alliance Incident",China should not only strengthen international cooperation and actively promote the exchange and co construction of anti-monopoly law enforcement with other countries,but also solve two problems at the level of domestic law regulation: first,lacking systematic laws and regulations to abide by the substantive system;second,the procedural system with overlapping functions and powers which may cause chaos.In order to solve such problem concerning shipping antitrust laws and regulations at the domestic level,China can appropriately learn from the regulation path of "general competition law rules + strict condition exemption" of the EU mode and China may also take the omni-directional regulation mode of "prior approval + Post regulation" of the United States into consideration,so as to continuously improve the competition law regulation path of China to deal with shipping monopoly.