First Finance Editorial: Sound Equity Protection Is the Best Anti-Involution Weapon

How can AI and the rights protection mechanism effectively prevent internal competition?

Exposing infringement behaviors is the most important safeguard for regulating platform economy development.

On the 23rd, Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Bureau, together with the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau and the Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, lawfully interviewed and provided administrative guidance to twelve platform companies. They focused on the first batch of issues identified since the comprehensive rectification of “internal competition” among platforms and issued requirements for rectification.

Protecting the legitimate rights and interests of platform operators and consumers, prohibiting mandatory or disguised mandatory pricing rules, selling goods below cost, and disrupting market competition order are key components of the three departments’ efforts to deepen the comprehensive governance of platform “internal competition.” The goal is to establish multi-party negotiation mechanisms, organize platforms to gather opinions on rule-making and promotional activities, and form long-term preventive mechanisms to promote healthy development of the platform economy.

Currently, some platform companies do have monopolistic capabilities through their rule-making and commercial decision-making mechanisms, directly or indirectly infringing on the legitimate rights of operators and consumers within the platform. This impacts or even interferes with enterprises’ pricing autonomy and consumers’ bargaining power. Conducting interviews on these behaviors is entirely necessary.

Using interviews for discipline and regulation highlights the regulatory authorities’ sensitivity in law enforcement, helping to strengthen embedded supervision—pre-warning, real-time tracking, and post-penalty—across the entire ecosystem. This creates dynamic matching and coordinated regulatory effects. The interviews focus on protecting the legitimate rights of all parties, emphasizing the public governance nature of regulation, and helping to enhance bargaining power for small and medium-sized operators and consumers on the platform.

Platforms are typical two-sided markets, where platform companies hold absolute authority in setting commercial rules and regulating access. This results in weaker rule and standard bargaining power for small operators and scattered consumers within this tripartite transaction structure.

Typically, promotional activities on platforms often make it difficult for small operators to refuse, effectively limiting their freedom of choice and pricing autonomy, forcing them to do things they would not otherwise choose.

Similarly, for consumers, platform interface rankings, intelligent content recommendations, sales rules that induce bulk buying, and other subtle cues that may suggest inducement interfere with user autonomy. The most typical example is the “full discount” phenomenon, where transaction rules lead consumers to unwillingly purchase unwanted goods and services, causing waste and overconsumption.

These behaviors are fundamentally violations and infringements, disrupting market pricing autonomy and infringing on transaction freedom, gradually accumulating to disturb market order. As AI and other technologies become integrated into daily life, the difficulty for platforms to attract users and maintain traffic increases, potentially pushing platforms to adopt more daring and covert infringement behaviors to boost performance.

Therefore, cracking down on behaviors that infringe on the legitimate rights of platform operators and consumers helps correct some platform companies’ deviations, allowing them to focus more on ecological governance, move beyond mere scale and price competition, and cultivate core competitive advantages.

It’s important to note that as AI continues to penetrate, the unique platform commercial decision-making rules and standard evaluation capabilities are undergoing systemic reshaping. For example, agents like OpenClaw can localize storage of customers’ true preferences and demands, making transactions between supply and demand less reliant on simple platform interfaces, search rankings, and traffic inflow. The end-to-end search, matching, and transaction costs for platform operators and consumers are being restructured, along with information architecture, communication structures, sorting, matching, and transaction frameworks. This presents new technological challenges to the cost-effectiveness and price competition models of platform companies.

At this point, regulatory authorities can use interviews to bring platform companies back into a cooperative game with operators and consumers. They can focus on core competitiveness in platform operation—how to better leverage service experience, more effectively reflect participants’ intentions, and improve internal information, communication, and transaction structures to reduce transaction matching costs. This approach balances immediate needs with long-term planning.

Of course, protecting people’s legitimate rights and interests requires not only regulatory norms but also expanding the legal channels and space for each independent market entity to defend their rights. Institutional design should follow the principle of minimizing economic and social costs, creating a fair and balanced trading environment and order where all legitimate rights can be recognized, respected, and protected.