China mulls revised law to better regulate online unfair competition

BEIJING, June 23 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature is set to mull a draft revision to the anti-unfair competition law, which includes provisions to better regulate unfair competition in cyberspace.

The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) will convene a session between Tuesday and Friday, where lawmakers are scheduled to deliberate the draft revision for the second review, according to Huang Haihua, spokesperson for the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee, at a press conference on Monday.

The latest draft includes new provisions regarding a fair competition review system with improved regulations to address the "rat race" competition among different online platforms. It also stipulates the obligations of platform operators to deal with unfair competition behavior among businesses operating on their platforms.

Moreover, the draft specifies the responsibilities of market regulatory authorities in combating unfair competition.

According to Huang, the draft outlines the criteria for identifying unfair competition practices such as violations of data interests and bad-faith transactions, and eyes solutions to issues such as large enterprises abusing their relative dominant market position to delay payments to small businesses.

The current anti-unfair competition law was enacted in 1993 and has been amended twice, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. The legislators reviewed a draft revision to the law at a session in December last year. ■