Collective Dominance within the Context of EU Electronic Communications Regulation

The Regulatory Framework concerning electronic communications networks and services in the European Union transposes the concept of collective dominance under Article 82 of the EC Treaty into electronic communications regulation as collective significant market power. However, it is of academic and also practical interest to see how the regulatory authorities to apply this concept under the regulatory regime, given a fact that collective dominance is still developing in the area of competition law. This article empirically examines the application of collective dominance by the national regulatory authorities based on the European Commission decisions according to Article 7 of the Framework Directive, with an aim to interpret the four economic factors to assess collective dominance, i.e. (1) oligopolistic market characteristics conductive to coordinate, (2) incentives to coordinate, (3) abilities to retaliate, and (4) abilities to resist market constraints, by concrete legal examples.