数字内容平台滥用市场力量的反垄断规制分析

Analysis of Antitrust Regulation on the Abuse of Market Power by Digital Content Platforms

数字内容平台的市场力量不仅来自平台生态系统中由规模经济、双边市场、网络效应和用户黏性等经济特性构建的天然市场壁垒,还源于内容产品的差异化属性以及海量版权集聚所形成的市场进入障碍。相比于市场份额等结构化要素,数字内容市场的竞争特点、进入壁垒和数字内容平台掌握版权资源的基本情况,以及平台对上下游版权市场的控制能力等非结构化要素,是评估其市场力量更为关键的考量要素。利用版权内容产业链上的特殊地位和渠道优势,数字内容平台可能对上游版权方或创作者施加不公平待遇、对中游竞争对手进行转授权限制、对下游版权使用者或终端消费者苛以各种使用限制。因此,应当引入数字内容生态监管的整体规制理念,结合版权要素应用场景以拓展现有滥用行为类型,并根据产品差异化理论细化竞争损害的分析维度,探索针对数字内容平台滥用市场力量的有效规制路径。

The market power of digital content platforms comes not only from the natural market barriers built by the economic characteristics of the platform ecosystem,such as economies of scale,bilateral markets,network effects and user stickiness,but also from the differentiated nature of content products and the market entry barriers created by the huge amount of copyright aggregation.In contrast to the structural element like market share,the non-structural elements,including the competitive characteristics of the digital content market and barriers to entry,the basic conditions under which digital content platforms have access to copyright resources,and the ability of the platform to control the upstream and downstream copyright market are more critical factors in evaluating the market power of the digital content platform.Taking advantage of their special position and channel advantages in the copyrighted content chain,digital content platforms may impose unfair treatment on upstream authors,sublicensing restrictions on midstream competitors and unreasonable requirements on downstream consumers to use copyrighted works.A new regulatory concept for the digital content ecosystem needs to be introduced to expand the types of existing abuses in relation to the application scenarios of copyrighted content and to refine the dimensions of analysis of competitive harm based on the theory of product differentiation,so as to more effectively regulate the abuse of market power by digital content platforms.