A working meeting of the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation with the Head of FAS

The Head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, Igor Artemiev informed the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev on improving the law on concessions and antimonopoly regulation in digital economy.

An extract from the short-hand notes:

Dmitry Medvedev: We have met recently to discuss improvement of concessions and the law on concessions. As agreed, I have signed the relevant order. Now all necessary amendments to the law should be prepared.

Apart from the concessions I’d like you to report on any other FAS proposals for improving the law on antimonopoly and tariff regulation.

Igor Artemiev: I would like to state that we have alreadydrafted the amendments uponthe outcome of the Government meeting on concessions and forwarded them to the Ministry of Economic Development.  The objective of the amendments is to make sure that concessioners can work uninterruptedly and invest in infrastructure.  I believe the draft law will be adopted in the near future.  

As for the changes to the antimonopoly law, we have seen in the recent years (perhaps, for already about two years) that as a result of digitalization of the economy - big centres for information storage, the Internet, various modern technologies – our law becomes only partly applicable to those new technologies.

For instance, robots conclude cartel agreements. It means that some people develop programs through which robots find the highest price of their competitors and adjust the prices of their companies to the highest one, and so on and so forth, all to the detriment of consumers.

Dmitry Medvedev: As I understand, it’s not possible to catch them?

Igor Artemiev: It is possible to catch a robot and then what to do with it? It is necessary to catch the person who programmed this. The most interesting is that the program is put together from different pieces and it is impossible to establish who the author is.  

Or, for instance, we work on big mergers and acquisitions. Now some such transactions concern the seed fund – a vital sphere for Russia.  When we look at the market share of these companies – it seems that it’s not that large. When we look at the plant protection system – the share also is not very big. And then it appears that the devil hides in all those additions on big data processing centres and technologies. Due to these data centres, technologies undergo such fine tuning that seeds can have particular germination ability and particular characteristics (for example, vermin protection), or lack them.

Dmitry Medvedev: And this is indicative as to what data processing centres, big data deal with?

To be continued...