Author:Huang Yinxu, Associate Professor,Renmin University of China Law School;  Research Fellow, Law and Technology Institute

Abstract:Large-scale digital platforms have gradually become both the infrastructure for controlling data and quasi-public institutions that formulate platform rules. This enables them to exploit their quasi-public power to distort the market mechanism of platform charging prices, thereby affecting the sustainable and healthy development of the digital economy. Unreasonable charges are widespread internationally and have become a structural problem, which indicates the predicament of existing governance mechanisms. Charging represents the price expression of platform power, and the traditional regulatory approaches formed in the industrial age cannot fully and effectively address the complex relational structures of the digital age. Therefore, it is necessary to explore a comprehensive governance path under the principle of curbing platform power: taking publicness as the basis of legitimacy to impose special price responsibilities on large digital platforms, strengthening the rule of law for open competition and users' right to data portability, promoting the negotiated formulation and transparency of platform rules, and weakening the data control capabilities and rule-making power of digital platforms. Through these multi-dimensional measures, the market-based pricing mechanism for charges can be restored.

Keywords:price governance;publicness;digital infrastructure;"rat race" competition;data monopoly platform rules