The Exploitative Abuse Prohibition

Abstract

The prohibition of exploitative abuse has attracted increasing attention in recent years, activated by many modern issues, also involving intellectual property rights. This article takes a bird’s-eye view of the policy distance between the United States, a core supporter of nonintervention, and the European Union, a core supporter of modest intervention. The article also examines the response of Japanese law, which includes the prevention of abuse of a superior bargaining position, a functional equivalent to the prohibition of exploitative abuse in this context. The provision against abuses of a superior bargaining position in Japan has been recently enforced in the context of private lawsuits as well. Such a holistic research framework will enable us to explore the potential responses of competition law to the challenges raised by data protection, the sharing economy, and other modern issues.