A Study Of The Competition Law On Paid Search

Paid search,which is provided by search engine service providers,is a way of Internet marketing.At present,paid search market in our country is full of trademark infringement,false propaganda,fraudulent clicks and so on.That may occur personal injuries and property demage,even worse,they may hardly disturb the marketing competition order.Therefore,regulating paid search becomes the urgent affairs.The paper takes unfair competition behavior of paid search market's,regulated by competition law,as the studying object,and takes the status quo of current law application as the start point,probing into difficulty of the current competition laws.Meanwhile,it bases on particularity of Internet market and takes international experience as a reference,raising solutions about the competition law's application.There's another thing,the competition laws in this paper shall be interpreted expensively in order to include the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and the Anti-monopoly Law.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this dissertation is divided into five parts.The first part is general analysis of the paid search.First,it elaborates social background of paid search emergence,its basic features and operating principle from the start.Second,it elaborates behaviors by collecting and summerizing the existing cases,which may destroy the order of market competition in current paid search market in our country,including trademark infringement,false propaganda,commercial bribe,fraudulent clicks,malicious shielding and so on.The second part is difficulty of paid search application.This part takes the existing cases as studying object and summerizes the focus of disputes about paid search in court,which are mainly focused on whether the search engine service providers and advertisers form a joint tort or not,whether they're false propaganda or not,and whether search engine service providers abuse market dominant position or not.Further more,current competition law about regulating paid search matters exists difficulty in competitive relationships,application of operators to fundamental conceptions,Judgment of competitive behaviors legitimacy,related market definition and cognizance of market share.The third part is the legitimacy of paid search on competition laws' regulation.It concludes that paid search shall be regulated by competition laws from its behavior nature,infringement to interest,and social relationships involved.The forth part is international legislative reference for our paid search competition laws.As we can see from the relevant literature and cases,the studying to paid search in foreign countries is mainly focused on whether the paid search,using other trademarks as its keywords,forms commercial utilization and how to define related market in two-sided market.Therefore,this paper presents international experience with two aspects in order to search for practicable plans.The last part is the way of perfecting paid search competition laws.This part raises solutions which aims at difficulty of the existing competitive law's application.The solutions include following aspects: first,reasonable expansion to denotation of fundamental conceptions;second,synthetic evaluations on legitimacy of competition laws;third,distinguishing the characters' nature of trademarks;forth,definitude prior review obligations to search engine service providers;fifth,improving definition ways of related market;sixth,weakening importance of market shares.