Online Consumers’ Right To Know And Its Protection

Attracted by various commodities and moderate prices on the internet,more and more consumers begin to shopping on the internet in recent years.Meanwhile, the differences between online shopping and traditionalshopping also bring challenges to the legal protection of consumers’ rightto know. From the perspective of consumers’ right to know, this paperdiscusses the relations and differences between online shopping andtraditional shopping, analyzes the means and reasons of violations in thereal life, points out the deficiencies of the relevant legal protection system,and puts forward some assumptions for the legal protection of onlineconsumers’ right to know.The text includes five parts：From perspectives of the subjects and connotations of consumers’right to know, the first part analyzes the relations and differences betweenonline shopping and traditional shopping at first. Then, it expounds theconcept of online consumers and the connotation of online consumers’ rightto know. It concludes that online shopping and traditional shopping havethe same legal subject, therefore, they are applicable to the PRC ConsumerProtection Law in the same way. However, as to the legal protection ofconsumers’ right to know, since their connotations are different, the specificlegal provisions for online shopping and traditional shopping should bedifferent, too.The second part summarizes the three kinds of tort means infringingthe online consumers’ right to know in real life, these are “make falsecommodity information”,“tell commodity information incompletely” and “keep commodity information unknown”.The third part mainly analyzes the reasons why online consumers’right to know is infringed again and again in real life, concluding that thereasons include the limitations of the internet, the legal hysteresis quality,the moral corruption of the suppliers, the inefficiency of the administrativesupervision, the imperfect of the dispute settlement mechanism and so on.The fourth part firstly summarizes contents of online consumers’ rightto know in current legislation, and then focuses on analyzing the currentthree legal quagmires for the protection of online consumers’ right to know,that is the non-system, impractical and relative lag of the current legalsystem.The fifth part puts forward some assumptions for the legal protectionof online consumers’ right to know. These include the establishment ofsystematic legal protection, the expansion of the scope of legal protection,the mandatory stipulation and tougher standards for suppliers’ disclosureobligation, the perfection of online consumers’ accession to commodityinformation, the regulation of false advertisements on the internet, the offerof convenient legal channels for online consumers and so on.