COUNTERING NEW CARTELS IS FAS PRIORITY

The most pressing issue today is efficiency of current antimonopoly regulation of digital economy, particularly, on exposing “digital” cartels

On 16 May 2019, atPetersburg International Legal Forum, FAS held a session on “Digital cartels as a challenge for antimonopoly regulation”.

Stats-Secretary, Deputy Head of FAS Andrey Tsarikovskiy who moderated the session pointed out that violators are the fastest to progress in novelties.

“This happened also with digital cartels. First, an achievement is consumed to harm, and then – to benefit”, added Deputy Head of FAS discussing digitalization, which has brought new cartelization methods: specialized programs based, particularly, on machine learning, are used increasingly more often to simplify cartel operations.

“Following the orders of the President, FAS prepared a draft law on amending the norms for administrative and criminal liability for cartels and submitted them to the Government. The suggested amendments include making bud-rigging collusion a separate Articles in the Criminal Code”, informed Andrey Tsarikovskiy.

He said that “digital violations are often committed without direct human involvement. FAS has already developed sufficient technologies to counter cartels”.

FAS practice includes first cases on applying price algorithms and auction robots. A symmetrical answer of the antimonopoly bodies was screening programs to expose bid-rigging collusions.

Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department Andrey Tenishev emphasized the controversial nature of the issues related to qualification response to new digital новые цифровые infringements of competition. He suggested extrapolating the prohibition to per se cartels and digital collusion, for instance, on data exchange collusions.

In his view, the forth industrial revolution is transforming legal relations, while the law is not always modified in accord with the social processes.

“The models of group behaviour are also changing. It is already necessary to assess new phenomena and amend the approaches”, continued Andrey Tenishev. “We have to decide how to evaluate the work of price algorithms on the markets, initiate draft laws on access of the Antimonopoly Service to the secrecy of communications”.

He stressed the importance of creating and new field of criminology – antimonopoly criminology to register and evaluate digital violations.

He also noted that responsibility for reacting to digital challenges rests not only with FAS but also with site operators as well as the legal relations participants, and proposed to form a new legal awareness to understand common responsibility.