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JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY  2022, Vol. 52 Issue (4): 50-66    DOI: 10.3785/j.issn.1008-942X.CN33-6000/C.2021.09.106
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Anti-competitive Regulation of “Banning” Behaviors on Social Platforms
Yang Dong, Hou Chenliang
School of Law, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China

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Abstract  With the continuous advancement of the digitalisation process, the demographic dividend of the Internet has bottomed out. Stock competition, among China’s digital platform companies has intensified, driving constant competitive development of new and more targeted products and services to cater to users’ needs. Social platforms are breaking traditional market territory and transmitting their market power to horizontal, vertical and even multi-dimensional markets. An even more intensive form of competition deployed by the social business platforms has been the use of “banning” methods to restrict traffic in order to give full play to the user traffic advantages of higher stickiness and stronger lock-in effect in its native market, and this has a serious negative impact on the ecological environment. In addition to competitors’ products or services, they form barriers to market access and expansion. In practice, anti-competitive behaviors such as “banning” are becoming more frequent, large-scale, and normalized, inhibiting the vitality of market competition and innovation, infringing on consumers and social public interests, and gradually becoming the crux of hindering the healthy development of the digital economy.The innovation of digital technology brings the risk of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, which keeps the market in a dynamic competition stage. In order to consolidate and strengthen its own market power, the dominant platform has begun to adopt a cross-border competition strategy to broaden and improve its own industrial ecology. With the comprehensive and in-depth advancement of industrial digitization, the platform penetration rate has become increasingly saturated, and the battle to increase user increment has come to an end, and the focus will then be on the competition for user stock traffic. The so-called traffic refers to the user traffic index of a specific platform website or app, which consists of the number of users, the number of visits, the average visit duration, and the total visit duration. Its essence is transaction opportunities and user attention. The irreplaceability and criticality of user traffic to platform development creates a new dimension of competition among platform ecosystems. In this context, social platforms abuse the autonomous power of “banning” by closing API interfaces, coercing users to “choose one”, and restricting, negatively processing, or even completely banning competitors’ information, services, and content sharing links, forming a traffic monopoly pattern.As an emerging organizational method and economic form in the development of the digital economy, platform ecology has transformative differences in its operation mechanism, behavioral model, competition logic and market structure from the traditional industrial economy. The dynamic, zero-price, and cross-market attributes of the platform ecology make it difficult to determine relevant markets, calculate market shares, and analyze competition damage.Therefore, we should jump out of the traditional analysis framework of the Anti-Monopoly Law, combine the competition structure of the digital economy, gain insight into the nature of platform traffic monopoly, and build a diverse and dynamic anti-monopoly regulatory system. The first is to develop regulatory technology to ensure the dynamic compliance of platform behavior, and to introduce a “gatekeeper” system to impose platform opening obligations to weaken the ex post punishment mechanism. The second is to fully consider the elements of competition. damage in the digital economy and reconstruct the antitrust analysis paradigm. The third is to grasp the dynamic balance between market fairness and efficiency, and use structural relief as the bottom line when necessary
Key wordsplatforms’ “banning”      cross-border competition      dynamic competition      traffic monopoly      structural relief     
Received: 10 September 2021     
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Yang Dong
Hou Chenliang
Cite this article:   
Yang Dong,Hou Chenliang. Anti-competitive Regulation of “Banning” Behaviors on Social Platforms[J]. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2022, 52(4): 50-66.
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https://www.zjujournals.com/soc/EN/10.3785/j.issn.1008-942X.CN33-6000/C.2021.09.106     OR     https://www.zjujournals.com/soc/EN/Y2022/V52/I4/50
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