SPC to clarify rules for new business types

Strengthening anti-monopoly, fair competition efforts to help economy

China’s top court has pledged to clarify rules for judging cases involving new forms of business and refine unfair competition and monopoly criteria to maintain market order and meet new social development demands.

“We’ll make rules more clear in new business fields, such as big data and artificial intelligence, and offer more specific standards for identifying unfair competition and monopolies to help build a unified and open market with orderly competition,” Lin Guanghai, chief judge of the Supreme People’s Court’s Third Civil Division, told a recent news conference at which he spoke about judicial efforts to tackle unfair competition and monopolies in recent years.

From 2018 to last year, Chinese courts heard more than 14,000 civil cases involving unfair competition, with the number increasing about 18 percent each year, according to the top court.

The number of concluded civil cases concerning monopolies rose to 107 last year from just six in 2008, it said.

Courts nationwide have intensified the handling of the two types of cases since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, “as strengthening anti-monopoly and fair competition is an intrinsic requirement of improving the socialist market economy”, Lin said.

“It’s also a new demand of the country’s digital economy and high-quality growth,” he added.

In 2019, for example, a Beijing court kept order in cyberspace and protected the legitimate rights of consumers by deeming a contract about increasing online views invalid and illegal.

In a statement disclosed by the Beijing Internet Court, the defendant, surnamed Xu, admitted to having made a contract with the plaintiff, surnamed Chang, for Chang to increase the views of an online game through an internet service.

Xu paid Chang an initial amount, but then refused to pay the rest because she thought the view data was problematic. Chang took Xu to court, claiming Xu had not fulfilled their contract.

After the hearing, the court said the contract damaged public interests and disturbed the order of cyberspace, so both parties needed to be fined.

A rising number of online views could attract more netizens to an online service, product or platform, but Zhang Wen, president of the court, said falsifying viewership, as in the case in question, was a kind of fraud, which misled internet users and brought disorder to the online business environment.

Describing the verdict as a sign of progress in fighting unfair competition in cyberspace, Lin, from the top court, said it had also played a bigger role in clarifying rules about online competition.

He said the top court is accelerating the making of judicial interpretations regarding the AntiUnfair Competition Law and the Anti-Monopoly Law.

“We’ll support government agencies to increase supervision of the market, cyberspace and the financial industry,” Lin said.