Data on competition

The experience of China

The Supreme People's Court presented a selection of competition cases related to the use¹ of data. In one case, Company A (the defendant) copied more than 50,000 videos from Company B's (the plaintiff) application, which contained Company B's application code, user nicknames, and avatars. Company A actually used the data posted on platform B and transferred it to its own platform for public distribution. Company A referred to the fact that Company B did not have intellectual property rights to user content, so such a transfer did not violate Company B's rights.

The court ruled that Company B had aggregated data posted by users who uploaded their videos based on the platform's user agreement and through its technical support. Therefore, the data uploaded by users has high commercial value. In addition, Company B invested significant resources (human and financial) in the formation and accumulation of data and attracted user traffic, which gave the data set additional economic value. Therefore, Company B's commercial interest in owning and commercially exploiting the data set is subject to legal protection even if Company B does not own the IP rights to such data. The court found a violation of competition, since the transfer of data from platform B to platform A led to the content offered to users being identical, i.e., company A attempted to “replace” the services of company B's platform, thereby violating its economic interest.

In another case, Company A (the plaintiff) operated a website for job seekers, including providing employers with the ability to search for employees by resume, download and forward resumes, etc. At the same time, Company B (the defendant) provided resume processing and recruitment management services for employers, etc. On Company B's website, it was possible to link external accounts, such as accounts on Company A's website or other websites, so that employers could centrally process resumes from all websites. To do this, the employer had to log in with their username and password from their account on Company A's website (or other websites), after which the systems automatically synchronized, and resumes from Company A's website were sent to the employer's personal account on Company B's website for further processing. However, by linking the accounts of the two platforms, resumes from company A's website were transferred to company B's information systems. As a result, a lawsuit was filed against company B for unfair competition, alleging that by linking accounts, company B used employers' logins and passwords, bypassed company A's data protection mechanisms (e.g., captchas) and automatically obtained, stored, and used the resumes collected by Company A.

However, the court found that there was no act of unfair competition, recognizing such behavior as a matter of the employer's right to transfer the data it had collected (including resumes) from one platform to another. In addition, the transferred resumes were stored exclusively in the employers' accounts and did not enter Company B's general resume database.

The experience of Russia

In Russia, the use of data in anticompetitive practices is currently not² regulated. However, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) takes into account the issue of access to data from large platforms, for example, when determining a dominant position. For example, the FAS assessed this factor in its³ 2019 investigation against HeadHunter, where the company created a difficult barrier to entry for other platforms that need to ensure a large base of job seekers and employers.

From the monitoring issue No. 8 (20), August 2025. Download the full issue (PDF) · issue page at the Gaidar Institute