과거 관리와 미래 지향 : 현행 공정거래법의 몇 가지 문제

A desirable competition law must protect the competition which induces individual selfish behavior to compete for improvement of productivity. The Korean competition law started to regulate Chaebols, and aims at promotion of competition, protection of consumers, and prevention of economic concentration. The Section 2, in order to prevent economic concentration, regulate dominant firms without considering the legitimacy of how they achieved the dominance, to penalize the winners and protect losers in productivity competition so that it contradicts another goal of the same law to promote competition. The Section 3 provides a broad basis for regulation of Chaebol behaviors which are irrelevant to market competition, and conflicts with the goal of general competition policies to distort, rather than promote, fair competition. The law, which views unfair internal trading as not a governance problem but a competition issue, errs to punish the only victims from the case. The basic nature of Chaebol problem, which is the legacy of development policy of the past era, is not the one that distorts market competition. But the present competition law, in order to settle the legacy inherited from the past, stubbornly retains the old stance to view Chaebol problem as competition issue, and this ironically hinders the fundamental purpose of competition law to promote competition. It requires to revise most extensively the Sections 2 and 3 of the present competition law in order not to discourage the enterprises of new age to concentrate their efforts to improve their productivities.