Original title: 87.6 million yuan!HowNet was fined for abusing its market dominance
In May 2022, the State Administration for Market Regulation filed a case for investigation into CNKI’s suspected monopoly conduct in accordance with the Anti-Monopoly Law. During the investigation period, the State Administration for Market Regulation set up a special case team to advance the investigation and handling of the case in a solid, efficient, steady and orderly manner in accordance with the law. Conduct in-depth inspections and big data analysis; organize experts to repeatedly carry out in-depth research and demonstration; listen to the opinions of CNKI many times to protect their legal rights.
After investigation, HowNet has a dominant position in the Chinese academic literature online database service market in China. Since 2014, HowNet has abused its dominant position to carry out monopolistic behavior. One is to implement the behavior of selling its database services at unfairly high prices by continuously and substantially increasing service prices, splitting databases and raising prices in disguise; the other is to restrict academic journal publishing units and colleges and universities by signing exclusive cooperation agreements Authorize any third party to use academic literature data such as academic journals, doctoral and master’s dissertations, and adopt various reward and punishment measures to ensure exclusive cooperation implementation. The investigation shows that CNKI implements unfairly high prices, restricts transactions, excludes, and restricts competition in the Chinese academic literature network database service market, infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of users, and affects the innovation and development of relevant markets and academic exchanges and dissemination. Article 22 Abuse of market dominance prohibited by items (1) and (4) of paragraph 1 of Article 22, such as “selling goods at unfairly high prices” and “restricting counterparties to transactions with them without justifiable reasons” Behavior.
According to the provisions of Articles 57 and 59 of the “Anti-Monopoly Law”, comprehensively considering factors such as the nature, degree, duration, and elimination of the consequences of illegal acts of HowNet, on December 26, 2022, the market The General Administration of Supervision and Administration made an administrative penalty decision in accordance with the law, ordered HowNet to stop illegal activities, and imposed a fine of 5% of its 2021 domestic sales of 1.752 billion yuan in China, totaling 87.6 million yuan. At the same time, adhere to the equal emphasis on regulation by law and promotion of development, supervise HowNet to fully implement rectification measures and eliminate the consequences of illegal acts, and require HowNet to carry out comprehensive rectification around the termination of exclusive cooperation, lighten user burdens, strengthen internal compliance management, etc., to promote healthy industry regulation Innovation and development.