Platforms will be tested for practice – Newspaper Kommersant No. 64 (7509) dated 04/13/2023

The pressure of supporters of tougher regulation of online platforms is growing. Against the background of a wide discussion of the claims of counterparties to Wildberries, the expert council at the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) will assess the integrity of both the practice of this company and the work of Avito, CYAN and Yandex.Taxi. The result may be a recommendation to strengthen control or introduce direct regulation. Both options will not be easy to implement, lawyers point out.

The Expert Council under the Federal Antimonopoly Service for the Development of Competition in the Field of IT will check the practices of Wildberries, Avito, CYAN, Yandex.Taxi for compliance with the principles of interaction between participants in digital markets. Kommersant has the text of the agenda of the meeting scheduled for April 21. Wildberries, Avito, CIAN, Yandex and other online platforms signed in February 2022 a memorandum of accession to the principles prohibiting unfair practices. But, the council notes, the FAS continues to receive numerous complaints against market participants.

In the case of Wildberries, the council will consider imposing penalties on sellers for incorrectly specified dimensions of goods and the absence of marking codes, charging fees for the return of non-compliant goods, restrictions on the placement of goods allowed for circulation. Consumers complain about Avito due to changes in the tariffs for services when placing ads, which could lead to an increase in cost. The question to CYAN concerns restrictions on the exchange of contact information between consumers and sellers. Drivers complain about Yandex.Taxi because of the high commission, and users because of unclear pricing.

BGP Litigation partner Irina Akimova is convinced that the agenda of the council is caused by a wide public outcry around the trade policy of marketplaces. In March, a conflict flared up between Wildberries and several order pick-up point (PVZ) managers over fines, after which the company took a number of measures to smooth relations with partners. It was also announced that online platforms were ready to sign new agreements on the principles of joint work with PVZ.

According to Ms. Akimova, a little more than a year has passed since the signing of the memorandum considered by the FAS Council, and the Council’s conclusions will allow us to assess the effectiveness of the principles of “soft law”. The Council, as follows from the meeting program, may recommend the FAS to ask the government to allow antimonopoly control of accredited IT companies and issue analogues of the warning to market participants.

The second option is to recommend the FAS to propose to the government to develop a draft separate law with administrative responsibility. Aleksey Kozhevnikov, CEO of ANO Digitalization and New Technologies, notes that a systemic problem has emerged in the relationship between digital platforms and counterparties that cannot be solved by self-regulation.

The FAS told Kommersant that they consider it possible to study the issue of lifting the moratorium on antitrust inspections of accredited IT organizations. The issue of the need to create a bill with direct regulation of the industry will also be considered taking into account the opinions of all interested parties, the service added. Kulik & Partners Law.Economics Managing Partner Yaroslav Kulik notes that the lifting of the ban on inspections of accredited IT organizations may involve the complete lifting of the moratorium on FAS inspections, and this will affect various markets. Ilya Bochinin, an antitrust and regulatory lawyer at Vegas Lex, adds that a separate law may be redundant given the pending “fifth antitrust package”, which already provides for measures against abuse in digital markets. The Ministry of Digital Development noted that they are monitoring the situation in the industry with the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Wildberries said that sellers’ proposals for measuring dimensions and rules for returning defective goods have already been approved through dialogue. Complaints about restrictions on placement, the company notes, relate to vapes and smoking accessories, whose sales are suppressed. Violations by sellers of the rules for the circulation of goods with labeling remain, and Wildberries counteracts this, they added. Avito said that for professional sellers, switching to pay-per-view or pay-per-click does not increase the average cost per client, but makes it unprofitable to create ads with fictitious prices and product descriptions. CYAN says that they only use spoof numbers, including for protection against fraud. In “Yandex.Taxi” “Kommersant” did not answer.

Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline-Analytics, believes that conflict situations with partners may partly be echoes of the struggle to improve the unit economy that digital platforms began in 2022. “The problems in the online market are understandable, given its rapid growth and novelty. It is difficult to expect that everything will go smoothly from the very beginning,” says Marat Ibragimov, Senior Analyst at Gazprombank. Dmitry Leonov, deputy chairman of the board of Rusprodsoyuz, is sure that systemic rules for online trading are needed, where the “presumption of innocence” and protection of the rights of all market participants should become the main principle.

Anatoly Kostyrev, Alexandra Mertsalova