필수설비론의 형성과 전개 -디지털 플랫폼 규제를 위한 試論

The essential facilities doctrine, which was a law prohibiting monopolization in Article 2 of the US Sherman Act, came to Europe and was used as a means to prohibit abuse of market dominance. In particular, this law was used as a policy means for market opening in so-called network industries such as telecommunication, transportation, and energy industries. In other words, the birth of the essential facilities doctrine has the background of regulating the behavior of market-dominant operators to refuse to trade. This doctrine prohibits the act of a dominant business operator refusing to grant access to infrastructure or other forms of assets that cause a 'bottleneck' so that his competitors can compete. The essential facilities doctrine has been introduced in several countries, including Korea, since it began with the US antitrust law. The requirements for applying this doctrine is that the facility will be controlled by a monopoly operator, that it will be practically or reasonably impossible for a competitor to build the facility, that competitor's request for facility use will be rejected, and that facilities can be provided. This doctrine has not been applied in EU for a while, but discussions on the possibility of re-using it for the regulation of large digital platform operators are now. In this paper, the background, concept, and applying requirements of essential facilities doctrine was examined as a premise to accurately grasp these recent regulatory issues.