FAS HAS REPORTED SUBMISSION OF THE "FIFTH ANTIMONOPOLY PACKAGE" TO THE STATE DUMA IN SEPTEMBER 2021

To date, it is under consideration by the Government of the Russian Federation

The FAS Russia held a meeting of the Commission on competition law and improving the antimonopoly law of the Association of Lawyers of Russia, devoted to the "fifth antimonopoly package".

"In response to the widespread of e-commerce, the antimonopoly service proposed new approaches to the antimonopoly regulation of modern digital markets in the form of a "fifth antimonopoly package". The innovations aimed to prevent any abuses by IT giants," Sergey Puzyrevsky, State Secretary-Deputy head of the FAS Russia, told the participants of the meeting.

Artem Molchanov, the head of the Legal Department of the FAS Russia, told the audience about the current state of the draft law. In the presentation, he focused on the main provisions of the document and also announced the preliminary term for its adoption.

"The draft law designed to extend the provisions of the Law on Protection of Competition on the digital industry (marketplaces and aggregators), has been included in the government's legislative activity plan for 2021. The draft law is currently pending approval by the government and is expected to be submitted to the State Duma for consideration by deputies," said Artem Molchanov.

Due to the lack of appropriate amendments provided for by the "fifth antimonopoly package" in the current legislation, the transaction between Yandex Taxi and Vezet Taxi took place. Such a transaction hurt the level of economic concentration in the taxi market since under current legislation it did not require approval of the FAS Russia.

The "fifth antimonopoly package" requiring participants to agree on transactions, the amount of which exceeds 7 billion rubles would help to slow the abovementioned transaction.

The participants of the meeting shared their views on the directions of global development of antimonopoly regulation in the context of economic digitalization and outlined the challenges ahead.

Representatives of the FAS Russia took the initiative to collect proposals and opinions of experts, as well as the professional community on the antimonopoly regulation of the so-called "non-transactional platforms": social networks, search systems, messengers and those forms of digital business that were not included in the "fifth antimonopoly package" and discuss them within the working group and at the next meeting of the Commission on competition law.