research conclusion
The central economic work conference in 2021 included “strengthening anti-monopoly and anti unfair competition and ensuring fair competition through fair supervision” in the section of “micro policies should continue to stimulate the vitality of market players”. Compared with the separate section of “strengthening anti-monopoly and preventing disorderly expansion of capital” last year, the length is reduced, but it is worth noting that, In the part of “correctly understand and grasp the characteristics and behavior laws of capital”, the expression “strengthen the effective supervision of capital according to law and prevent the barbaric growth of capital” appears, which means that the supervision of capital is not over, but may be further diversified in form.
In this context, in the future, we will launch the “focus on digital economy supervision: biweekly observation” report with two weeks as the update frequency to track the trends of digital economy supervision at home and abroad, and a series of thematic studies that have been released in the early stage and are still being updated (including “what far-reaching impact does the personal information protection law have?” “Digital tax after G7 agreement”, “what means may be identified as unfair competition by taking advantage of monopoly position?” “What acts are punished by the strongest data protection law in Europe?” (etc.) mutual confirmation.
Recently, China’s digital economy supervision events have emerged intensively. In the past two weeks, it is worth paying attention to:
(1) Continue to standardize the tax order of the webcast industry, and impose a large fine on the illegal head anchor;
(2) Sina, Zhihu, etc. have been interviewed and punished according to law due to repeated problems such as information prohibited by laws and regulations;
(3) Personal information protection continued, and the Ministry of industry and information technology intensively removed apps suspected of infringing on users’ rights and interests, including well-known apps such as Douban;
(4) Alibaba cloud was suspended as a partner of the network security threat and vulnerability information sharing platform of the Ministry of industry and information technology for 6 months because it did not report the discovered vulnerability information to the competent telecommunications department in time.
The supervision and improvement board is continuously carried out. Recent 54 page antitrust compliance guidelines in the field of platform economy in Beijing (version 2021) was officially released to explain the basic content, behavior performance and risk tips of suspected monopoly regulated by the anti-monopoly law, and list cases to guide platform enterprises to carry out anti-monopoly compliance management, which has a large amount of information, and also shows that local market supervision departments also play an important role in the field of anti-monopoly in the field of platform economy.
We believe that for Internet companies, the impact of fines, off the shelf and other events is short-term, However, strong supervision will bring a series of long-term effects that can not be ignored: (1) the restriction on obtaining personal information will affect the accuracy of users’ portraits, which may reduce the advertising conversion rate; (2) the prohibition of “one of two” will make enterprises have to spend more marketing costs to ensure that users stay on their own platform; (3) In the case of limited user attention, strong regulation of content may affect advertising and marketing.
Risk statement
Internet companies have new regulatory risk events in cross-border data transmission, personal information protection, antitrust and other fields.
