경쟁법의 역외적용에 대한 법적검토 - 역외적용 이론의 발전 및 적용상의 문제점을 중심으로 -

Abstract

Due to globalization of economy, competition law offenses in a country might discourage the welfare of consumers in other countries and cause market disturbance. Thus each country has been putting every efforts to regulate this if any enterprises, in spite of belonging to other countries, influence on their own countries. What requested for that is to develop the application theory of competition law and consolidation of relevant regulations. The main theories to apply their country's competition law to the one of other countries are Effect Doctrine, Economic Single Unit Doctrine and Place of Implementation Theory. In case of the United States, even though there was a jurisdictional rule of reason through Interest balancing approach in the past, it has consistently applied its own Sherman Act to other countries in accordance with Effect Doctrine. And the related legislative system also has been revised or legislated to support this. In case of Europe, EU-Commission has been driving European competition policy under Effect Doctrine, but the Court of Justice of the European Communities has been applying competition law with Economic Single Unit Doctrine and Place of Implementation Theory. Though the Court of First Instance employed Effect Doctrine in the case of Gancor judgement, the Court of Justice of the European Communities still do not admit Effect Doctrine explicitly. In case of Korea, it didn't make a huge improvement regarding extraterritorial Application of competition law in the past. From the previous cases of black-lead electrode and vitamin, however, it came to have much interest in extraterritorial application of its competition law. The black-lead electrode case mentioned above has a great meaning in terms of extraterritorial application of Korea's competition law. In this case, Korea Fair Trade Commission put its focus based on Effects Doctrine and established provisions on extraterritorial application of The Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act with this as a momentum. Extraterritorial application of competition law is the area that there is a sharp conflict of interests between nations on this point, so there is no unified international standards. Even though there have been much efforts on this, good results have not been produced because of conflict of interests. In recent times, accordingly, cooperative relations regarding extraterritorial application each other have been established by means of bilateral cooperation agreement or bilateral trade agreement including FTA. Integration of global economy seems to be more accelerated in the near future and there would be many problems emerged from extraterritorial application of competition law as business markets are expanded. In this respect, more in-depth discussion on this matter has to be done.