FTA체제에서 통상문제로서의 전자상거래 경쟁정책에 관한 연구

This article mainly deals with separate but closely related global 3issues of trade in e-commerce under international competition system. First, this article concerns the background of competition law comes from the U.S. law, especially "Sherman Act," and related case laws. The U.S. laws affected and expanded the competition legal system of other countries, such as European Communities and Korea. However,the international competition regime hasn't yet reached a uniform legal system that can be commonly applied to most countries at present. So some international organizations, such as the WTO and OECD, has discussed the connection issue for relating competition policy to international trade, but their effort never got successful fruits because of their inherent limitations. In this circumstance, many countries went through with changes, that is they introduced regional/bilateral trade system such as FTAs instead of multilateral trade system for solving this issue. And the next, trade in e-commerce shows a lot of systematic and legal problems in the international competition circumstance. Especially, it is hard to decide "market definition,""market power," and "anti-competitive practices (or business restriction behavior)" of trade in e-commerce. And more, some characteristics and classification issues also raise an important systematic problems between trade in e-commerce and international competition. Therefore,the very theoretical solution of the issue is to make a single and uniform international competition law that will be able to applied to international trade including e-commerce trade, and that is based on the past discussions in the WTO and OECD. However, this method remains quite theoretical frameworks not reflecting the current international regime. Thus, this article concludes and makes an alternative proposal that many countries can easily access the possible solution. This article finds this solution in FTAs. In other words, this system can be summarize as following steps: First, a variety of actors in international trade and competition should find common factors, that is, crossing points among each nation's legal system of competition including the past results of debates in the WTO and OECD. Second,the prospective Parties of every FTA should reflect these factors to its FTAs for competition issues. And the third and finally, it encourages the future Parties of FTAs that the FTA should be expanded in the international trade legal frameworks as a de facto "Model Law." This can be the best possible alternative for solving the international competition issues in trade in e-commerce so far.