Recently the Administration for Market Regulation (the AMR) of Zhejiang Province (China) by the means of online supervision system successfully identified that on certain platforms some prices had been the same before the sale day or some goods were sold even cheaper than half-cost. The cases was immediately transferred to the investigation department.
Zhejiang Fairness Online System is a breakthrough supervision tool, developed by the Zhejiang AMR and targeted on the alleged monopolistic and anticompetitive practices on the e-platforms, such as “either-or choice”, big data price discrimination, selling below cost, vertical agreements and unauthorized economic concentrations. The system employs big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence etc to monitor the activity of online platforms and to identify unlawful behavior in digital economy.
Starting from February 26, the system is being test launched after three-year long development. At the moment it covers 20+ platforms, 10 000+ shops, 500+ key brands and 100 000+ goods. As the officers of Zhejiang AMR expressed, the system was developed in the pursuit of digital revolution, it ensures more comprehensive, systematic, effective and coordinated management of online economy.
The innovative functions of the system are:
• to perform real-time supervision of qualification of undertakings, trading rules, sale prices etc;
•
to collect data about Internet monitoring, business registrations,
reports and complaints, as well as topics of high public interest in
order to create a multidimensional picture of the current state of
platform economy;
• to develop risk identification models in order to
identify the characteristics of alleged misconduct among the huge
volumes of data;
• to assess, analyze, verify and filter information about risks to ensure accurate identification of improper intentions;
•
to provide proof-of-existence using blockchain, to ensure that improper
intentions are traceable, provable and impossible to falsify.
Zhejiang
province has a highly developed platform economy: in terms of the
number of digital companies, economic scale and innovation abilities,
the region rates one of the the biggest in China. There are 300 online
platforms of various types in Zhejiang, with 9 mil of registered shops
(almost half of all Chinese platform shops) that provide services to 960
mil consumers worldwide.
