Anticompetitive Practices in the Mobile Communications Sector

Abstract

Telecommunications sector is charaterized by oligopolistic market structure with one dominant player (erstwhile or extant state monopoly) and one or more smaller players. In the case of Slovenia, the dominant player is Mobitel d.d., while the smaller ones are Si.mobil d.d., TušMobil d.d. and some others. Form the competition protection's point of view (where there are three major areas of competition abuses, horizontal mergers, vertical and horizontal agreements and abuse of dominant position), the telecommunications sector is relatively unproblematic in the first two of these areas, but problems abound in the third area: abuse of dominant position. National competition authoritiy (NCA) take care of all three kinds of abuses. In addition to this, telecommunications are also characterized by (ex-ante) industry regulation. Purpose of this article is to describe typical anticompetition abuses that arise in telecommunications sector from the legal and economic point of view and point to the relevant formal tests that the NCAs are using in order to determine the presence or absence of certain abuses.