Review of 2021丨Three major keywords of the Internet year: antitrust, personal information protection and interconnection

The coming year 2021 will be quite long for the Internet industry. This year, two large Internet platform companies were issued sky-high fines due to monopoly issues, the "Personal Information Protection Law" was officially promulgated and implemented, and the interconnection of Internet platforms is steadily advancing. The impact of the above three important events on the Internet industry is immeasurable, and they are also affecting everyone who uses the Internet.

On December 4, the 225th Digital Forum co-sponsored by the China Cyberspace Security Association, the Internet Society of China, and the School of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University was held in Beijing. The forum was titled "Platform Governance Annual With the theme of "Review", it reviewed a series of major events that occurred in the Internet industry this year.

Carry out antitrust to the end

On April 7, four months after the investigation of Alibaba’s “choose one” case, the regulatory boots were officially launched, and the State Administration for Market Regulation made an administrative punishment, ordering Alibaba Group to stop abusing its market dominance and issuing a fine of 18.228 billion yuan. On October 8, Meituan, another giant in the Internet industry, was also fined a total of 3.442 billion yuan for "choosing one of the two" behavior.

When the digital economy is booming, the supervision of the digital economy is also increasingly improving. Previously, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee conducted the 34th collective study session on promoting the healthy development of my country’s digital economy. The meeting pointed out that it is necessary to regulate the development of the digital economy, adhere to the promotion of development and supervision and regulation, and both must be strong, standardize during development, and develop while regulating.

The latest data shows that the scale of my country's digital economy reached 39.2 trillion yuan in 2020, accounting for 38.6% of GDP, maintaining a high growth rate of 9.7%, and becoming a key driving force for stable economic growth. At the same time, some companies with "first-mover advantages" rely on their market share to squeeze out competitors and obtain monopoly profits, which has seriously affected the normal development of the market order.

Chen Jihong, secretary-general of the Information Network and High-Tech Professional Committee of the All-China Lawyers Association, believes that the difficulty or implementation problem of platform antitrust is ultimately the supervision of data. Data is the core asset of the platform. At present, the anti-monopoly behaviors of platforms that are much discussed, such as big data maturity and differential treatment, are all implemented through data algorithms. Therefore, data supervision is the core element of platform anti-monopoly.

The supervision of data will become the focus of antitrust in the next stage. Yang Dong, executive director of the Competition Law Institute of Renmin University of China, pointed out that competition in the digital economy is evolving into competition between platforms, and behind platform competition is ecological competition, which highlights the value of data circulation as a new factor of production. Antitrust at the data level will become the focus of the next stage of governance.

There are laws to protect personal information

In addition, Wang Chunhui believes that the "gatekeeper" system specially established for large enterprises may be "abused." Because this "gatekeeper" system gives large Internet platforms a "law enforcement power", do large Internet platforms have the ability to investigate the compliance of other operators' personal information processing on the platform in accordance with the law? There are doubts about this. It is recommended that relevant national departments issue regulations specifically targeting the "gatekeeper" system so that the "gatekeeper" system itself has a legal basis.

Now, the "Personal Information Protection Law" has been officially implemented for more than a month. There are no typical cases on how to protect personal information, how companies should collect personal information, how to process it, and individuals' ownership of their own data. Available for reference. How to further promote social innovation through governance, release the vitality of data elements, and make data flow more smoothly is testing practitioners in related industries and will also become the key to the development of the future digital economy.

Platform interconnection is deepened and solidified

On September 13, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology required that all Internet platforms must be unblocked according to standards within a time limit, otherwise disciplinary measures will be taken in accordance with the law.

Previously, according to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Zhao Zhiguo, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is guiding relevant Internet companies to carry out self-examination and rectification in accordance with the program arrangements for special actions to rectify the Internet industry. However, during the self-examination and rectification, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology learned that some Internet companies still have a certain gap between their understanding of the issue of blocking URL links and the requirements for special actions. To this end, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has adopted various forms such as administrative guidance meetings to further help enterprises realize that interconnection is an inevitable choice for the high-quality development of the Internet industry, and allowing users to use the Internet smoothly and safely is also the direction of the Internet industry's efforts.

However, interconnection is not a "new thing" in the Internet industry. The core spirit of the Internet is equality, collaboration and full sharing. The Internet that blocks each other goes against this basic spirit. The traffic generated by Internet activities should be classified as public traffic. The mutual blocking behavior between platforms is suspected of controlling public traffic to serve the interests of one's own company and conflicts with public interests.

Today, the rapid development of mobile Internet has penetrated into every aspect of our daily lives, bringing great convenience to our lives, but also lurking challenges everywhere. The healthy development of the platform economy based on the mobile Internet is becoming a current issue. Some of them deliberately "build walls" for their own interests and maliciously "block" links from competitors, which brings great inconvenience to netizens' Internet lives. The capital of Internet companies is still expanding without restrictions.

Interconnection is the spiritual core of the digital age and the "key" that opens the digital door. The removal of “walled gardens” between platforms is an inevitable trend. Creating an interconnected network ecosystem is what the people want and is an inevitable choice for the high-quality development of the Internet industry. In the future, the governance of interconnection will surely become another key area faced by the Internet industry, and will also open up a new pattern for the in-depth development of my country's digital economy.