Types of abusive conduct
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position is regulated under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Before going into details of the types of abusive conduct, it would be helpful to examine Article 102.
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The major forms/types of abusive conduct generally falls into three categories which are (i) exclusionary abuses, (ii) exploitative abuses and (iii) discriminatory abuses.
(i) Exclusionary abuses
Exclusionary abuses comprise all practices that a dominant undertaking may use to obstruct others, restrict their options, establish entry barriers and therefore remove or weaken the potential competition. Different forms of exclusionary abuses are shortly specified below:
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- Refusal to deal: A dominant firm may eliminate competitors from the downstream market and thereby prevent effective competition by refusing to supply or give competitors access to an input. This abusive conduct is used as a potential strategy for vertically integrated dominant undertakings.
(ii) Exploitative abuse
Exploitative abuse consists in directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions. It is an abusive conduct which exploits customers or suppliers. However, it is a bit challenging to determine when a price is ‘excessive’ and ‘unfair’.
(iii) Discriminatory Abuses
Price discrimination is the major discriminatory abusive conduct. As a means of discriminatory abuse, different consumers are charged different prices for the same product. In other saying, in price discrimination different, prices are collected from the same product or the same price is collected from different products.
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