This was reported during a meeting of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy by the head of the FAS Maxim Shaskolsky.
Accredited IT companies may be taken out from under the moratorium on antimonopoly control adopted in 2022, FAS of Russia announced. The abolition would not affect all market participants. First of all, it may concern marketplaces and aggregators: "Yandex.Taxi", Wildberries and Ozon. The services themselves assured that the abolition of the moratorium will not have a negative impact on their work. However, they emphasized that strict regulation could create problems for e-commerce.
In the nearest future FAS will be able to conduct inspections of IT-companies, Maxim Shaskolsky, the head of the service, said during a meeting of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy:
"The authority was a little limited because of the 448th decree. My colleagues and I have done some work and came to the opinion that it is time to remove antimonopoly control from the decree, and this will be done in the coming days."
The FAS initiative will not affect all IT companies.The legislative changes may affect Article 10.1 of the Federal Law "On Competition", which provides for the prohibition of abuse of dominant position of business entities that own a digital platform
"Such digital platforms include an extremely small number of IT market participants, as such an organization must own a digital platform, its revenue must exceed 2 billion rubles, and the share of transactions between buyer and seller must be more than 35% of all transactions on this market,"
said a spokesperson of the Ministry of Digital Development of Russia.
The Ministry assured that the moratorium will continue to apply to most companies.
Ozon and Wildberries assured that they comply with antitrust laws and the lifting of the moratorium will not have a negative impact on the work of the companies.
Ozon emphasized that recent months have seen an increase in regulatory initiatives "aimed at strict regulation of e-commerce, which may deprive the market of flexibility." At the same time, the company added that business checks "can be a balancing factor" that will identify problem points of specific market players without resorting to "over-regulation of the industry."
Source: Kommersant
