The Electronic Commerce Law of the People's Republic of China has been passed. It stipulates that e-commerce platform operators shall not make use of the service agreement, trading rules and technical means to limit or add unreasonable additional conditions on transactions, transaction price and the deals with other business operators within the platform. Violators shall be ordered by market supervision and regulation department to make corrections within a time limit, and a fine between fifty thousand Yuan and five hundred thousand Yuan can be imposed. Under serious circumstance, a fine between five hundred thousand Yuan and two million Yuan can be imposed.

This article obviously intends to point out the “either-or” strategy of electric business platforms. In recent years, for the big online promotion events such as "6 · 18" and "Double 11", some e-commerce platforms, especially a few giants overtly or covertly force operators on their platforms to sign a so-called "exclusive cooperation agreement", in order to limit operators’ promotional activities to their own platform only. Other e-commerce platforms, in-platform operators and consumers react strongly against this. Industry insiders, experts and scholars have also put forward criticism and suggestions.

The Interim Provisions on Management of E-commerce Goods and Services Promotional Events which came in to force in October 2015, and 2018 Online Market Regulation Special Action (Net Sword Action) Program jointly issued in June by the NDRC and MIIT had all proposed explicit ban to the “either-or” strategy. Based on the importance and particularity of the Internet industry, the new law of electronic commerce has, to some extent,  broken through the traditional framework of antitrust constraints, and regulation against "either-or" behavior of the e-commerce platforms has been preliminarily realized.

The implementation of “either-or” strategy on E-commerce platforms had also damaged the contracting freedom and development space of other platforms and operators. If this happen to each platform, the result will be a disordered market in which the platforms implement “either-or" strategy and sit on their monopolized interest free from being constantly evaluated and selected by business operators.

In this sense, the new e-commerce law which bans e-commerce platforms to implement "either-or" strategy and specifies penalties, has actually broken the traditional restriction of "dominant" elements in antitrust legislation and became an "illegal" rule of prohibited behavior. That is, as long as any e-commerce platform has forced the "either-or" strategy or other related business behavior on business operators, it constitutes a monopoly violation.

With ever increasing influence of "Internet +" in all industries, the above exploration of antitrust legislation in the field of e-commerce platform is expected to provide reference and enlightenment for antitrust regulation in   the wide fields of real economy.

Source: Beijing Youth Daily

The Author: Liao Yinzhi, Associate professor, Law school of Central University of Finance and Economics