Antimonopoly regulation of direct sales of goods by the supplier within a single market with distributors

The article analyzes the antimonopoly adjustment of difficult economic relations between suppliers and their distributors in cases when suppliers are direct competitors of distributors' own network. The author studies the collision of applying the per se prohibitions and the "vertical" restrictions, taking place in the current Law on protection of competition. Distribution contract in the Russian legal system is one of the unnamed contracts since the distribution practices have been introduced in the Russian trade turnover along with the appearance of a major brand manufacturers. The distribution agreement has a number of specific features, which do not allow to fully apply the analogy of the Civil Code, as distributor relationships are not those of supply, franchise or agency. However, the specificity of the figure of a distributor acting not as a final consumer goods purchaser, and performing the functions of resellers, largely modifies the entire structure of the contract of sale that the distributor can be considered as an intermediary between the supplier and the end user, acting on behalf of the manufacturer. That is why up the wrongful judicial practice consists in the rules of the agency contract applied to the relations of distribution. When vendor sales are competing, actions can no longer be qualified as anti-competitive coordination of economic activity, because the provider operates in the commodity market, which made coordination of distributors' actions.