China’s Practice in Finding Market Dominance of Online Platforms

In the past year, one of the most important and noteworthy events for China’s antitrust legislation and enforcement has been the intensification of antitrust scrutiny of large online platforms, with tech giants receiving huge fines for their abusive activities. Under China’s antitrust laws and regulations, the dominant market position of a company is the first step and prerequisite for finding the illegality of its abusive behavior. This paper intends to analyze the approaches and practices of determining the market dominance of online platforms based on relevant antitrust enforcement cases, along with the newly issued guidelines for this economy sectors, in order to provide useful references for a better understanding of the latest developments in China.

By WU Peng, LONG Rui & DONG Ke^[1]

With a number of online platforms and e-commerce transactions, China is the largest e-commerce market in the world. The possible regulatory loopholes in antitrust law and regulations in the face of digital economy have aroused widespread concern. For this purpose, in the past year, the authority has successively issued the Anti-monopoly Guidelines on Platform Economy Sectors (“Guidelines”) and the Draft Amendment to the Antimonopoly Law of the People’s Republic of China (“Draft Amendment”) for public comments, in the hope of providing clearer guidance on the enforcement of antitrust laws to platform economy sectors. In addition to the Guidelines c