Combating platforms’ anti- competitive practices

The experience of US, EU, and

China

In March 2024, the European Commission opened its first investigation into¹ Google and Apple's non-compliance under the Digital Marketplace Act. Apple is accused of restricting the ability of developers to freely sell their applications through Apple's services, Apple charges additional fees and creates technical restrictions, violating competition rules. Google favors its own services to the detriment of competitors' services.

As early as 2021, China, the EU and the US began cracking down on anti-competitive practices by platforms. At the same time, the EU and the US extend special rules to “large² platforms”, China - to any.

Countries set a list of platforms’ anticompetitive practices:

1. Combine personal data, e.g., for digital profiling (EU only). Data from social network services must not be combined with data from advertising services.

2. Provide advantages to your own products over those of sellers on the platform.

3. Create more favorable treatment in rating for own products/services compared to similar products/services of vendors or competitors.

4. Disadvantage some vendors over others in terms of service.

5. Use non-public data generated by sellers when using the platform services to compete with such sellers.

6. Limit the ability of merchants to sell products/services to customers through third-party platforms or through their own direct online sales channels at prices and terms that differ from those offered through platform services.

7. Apply binding agreements, i.e. requiring consumers to use some platform services to access other services.

Moreover, in the EU and the US, large platforms have a number of obligations, e.g.:

1. Ensure interoperability of platform services with third-party services.

2. Provide consumers with the ability to uninstall platform applications, change default settings, or use applications from other platforms.

3. Ensure that sellers have access to the data that it or its customers generate, as well as the option to migrate such data.

Russia’s experience

Article 10.1 of the Law on Protection of Competition establishes the prohibit on monopolistic activities by a platform in a particular commodity market that occupies a dominant position, which:

1) Through network effects has a decisive impact on the market where transactions are made through the platform or makes it difficult for other economic entities to access this commodity market. However, there is no methodology for determining network effects.

2) The share of transactions through the platform exceeds by value 35% of the total volume of transactions made on this market.

3) Revenue for the last year - over Rb2 bn.

Unlike the EU and the US, Russia does not assess the number of users on platforms, but the share of commodity market transactions executed through the platform, which can create difficulties in determining platform size (especially for multi-commodity platforms) and market position.

There is no clarification for platforms on what practices may be prohibited.

From the monitoring issue No. 3, March 2024. Download the full issue (PDF) · issue page at the Gaidar Institute