Zhai Wei, executive director of the Competition Law Research Center of East China University of Political Science and Law: Regulating monopolistic behaviors such as bans and bans will help the steady development of the platform economy

Let it be | wen

In August, at an online academic seminar on "Platform Economy: Competition Governance and Orderly Development", Zhai Wei, executive director of the Competition Law Research Center of East China University of Political Science and Law, said that the monopolistic behavior of super platforms is not conducive to market innovation and the development of small and medium-sized enterprises. Through the analysis of new monopolistic behaviors such as banning and choosing one of the two, we will study their regulatory paths to achieve the goal of promoting development with supervision and promoting innovation with supervision, and ultimately to safeguard the social public interest and achieve the development goal of the Internet platform economy.

According to Zhai Wei, the purpose of this meeting is to comply with the trend of Strengthening Anti-monopoly Supervision in the field of platform economy in China and to discuss some legal issues that urgently need to be solved. Since November last year, China's Internet platform economy has entered a period of strengthening anti-monopoly supervision, and there have been some typical events at the legislative, law enforcement and judicial levels, such as the State Administration of Market Regulation has made law enforcement penalties for the two alternatives, and recently the CPC Central Committee and the State Council have clearly proposed to strengthen and improve anti-monopoly law enforcement in the "Outline for the Implementation of the Construction of a Rule of Law Government (2021-2015)". Therefore, in the context of strengthening anti-monopoly supervision, we need to identify and regulate the new types of monopolistic behaviors that are still controversial in the economic practice of Internet platforms, which requires the joint efforts of the theoretical and practical circles to determine some detailed standards.

Although there is also a platform economy in the traditional economic field, Zhai Wei said that the traditional anti-monopoly law provisions originating from the era of industrial economy cannot be fully applied in the era of network economy. In the era of network economy and even the digital economy, the platform economy has the characteristics of the typical Internet field, which has led to a series of new anti-monopoly problems. For example, in the bilateral and multilateral markets in the field of Internet platform economy, how to define relevant markets, determine market dominance, and define abuse standards. Further, in the era of the Internet platform economy, the head platform enterprises may pursue self-control relying on traffic, refuse the reasonable sharing of traffic, and profit through traffic realization, etc. These new monopoly behaviors with platform self-preferential treatment and ban as the form of performance are new characteristics and new phenomena that are not possessed in the traditional economic field.

In addition, Zhai Wei said that China's supervision of the economic field of Internet platforms, in addition to the economic law supervision with the Anti-Monopoly Law as the core, also involves the laws of other departments such as civil and commercial law and administrative law, which is a cross-departmental legal supervision system. At present, in the field of Internet platform economy, the dimension of compliance is not limited to anti-monopoly, but also involves issues such as anti-unfair competition, consumer rights protection, labor rights protection, data privacy, and data security.