Research On Regulation Of Unfair Competition Behavior Of Price Comparison Software

Price comparison software is a kind of crawler technology to grab the commodity information on the e-commerce platform and sort out and classify it.By setting the price comparison,price change trend,user evaluation and other functions,it provides convenience for consumers to make the best choice in online shopping,and promotes the operators to provide high-quality and low price goods or services to the market.However,the price comparison software not only plays a positive role in the market competition,but also faces the dispute of unfair competition.The case of Tmall company suing Zai he company and Zai Xin company for unfair competition is the first case involving unfair competition dispute of shopping assistant in China.By applying Article 2 of the anti-unfair competition law,the court held that the acts of the two defendants constituted unfair competition on the grounds that the shopping assistant violated the principle of good faith and recognized business ethics.However,the second article of the anti-unfair competition law is too principled.Facing a field that has not been fully developed,the shaping role of judges will have a great impact on the direction of market development.This paper hopes to discuss how to specify the general terms and establish the specific regulatory path and investigation factors in the field of price comparison software from the perspective of misleading consumers and technology discrimination.The first part discusses the dilemma of identifying unfair competition behavior of price comparison software from the perspective of misleading consumers.Among the seven kinds of unfair competition behaviors that have been classified in the anti-unfair competition law,the price comparison software may involve the unfair competition behaviors that directly infringe on the interests of consumers,including commercial confusion and false propaganda.In this part,by analyzing the elements of commercial confusion and false propaganda,the author explains the possible problems in the application of these two ways to regulate the price comparison software.The second part discusses the dilemma of identifying unfair competition behavior of price comparison software from the perspective of technology discrimination.The behavior of price comparison software using technical means to manipulate user search results is consistent with that of Google in the EU Google case.Price comparison software is essentially a search engine,and the bidding ranking of search engine also involves the risk of unfair competition.In this part,through the analysis of Google case and bidding ranking in EU,the possible problems in the application of these two ways to regulate the price comparison software behavior are explained.The third part is the exploration of identifying the unfair competition behavior of price comparison software.By referring to the contents of the German anti unfair competition law that hinder competitors and the provisions of the UK on price comparison software,this paper lays the foundation for the fourth part to put forward regulatory suggestions.The fourth part puts forward suggestions on regulating unfair competition of price comparison software.First of all,combined with the experience of foreign countries,this paper summarizes a way to identify unfair competition behavior which is suitable for the development of price comparison software in China.On this basis,the author puts forward the investigation factors to identify the unfair competition behavior of price comparison software.