eMAG is one of the largest online stores in Romania, and against it the authorities imposed a fine of 6.7 million euros due to the abuse of a dominant position that was found by the Competition Council, the announcement was made today.
eMAG recognized the act for which it was sanctioned, and announced that it would impose a series of corrective measures so that it no longer had problems of this kind, and you can find additional details about what the Competition Council announced today below.
"The Competition Council fined the company Dante International SA with 32,28 million lei (approximately 6,7 million euros) for abuse of a dominant position on the market of intermediation services through online marketplace platforms and imposed a series of corrective measures on the company to restore the normal competitive environment and to prevent the occurrence of such facts.
Following the investigation launched at the end of 2017, the Competition Council found that Dante International SA, as the owner and administrator of the eMAG Marketplace online platform, abused its dominant position, between January 2013 and June 2019, in particular, by positioning and the more favorable display of its own product offer at the expense of the offers of partners who traded on the platform and with whom it was in direct competition.
In this way, the offers of eMAG.ro affiliate partners were limited, which led to the impact of real competition between the product offers presented on this platform. The company admitted the anti-competitive act and benefited from a reduction of the fine.
In order to prevent these facts from happening again, the competition authority required the company to adopt a series of measures regarding the algorithms used by the platform, with Dante having the obligation to fully and correctly inform partner merchants on how the algorithms work, such as those of listing, those positioning products on the platform and to limit
manual interventions in the operation of the relevant algorithms.
At the same time, the company must develop changes to the organizational structure, create a system for managing the data collected and stored through the platform, so that access to this aggregated data is carried out in a non-discriminatory manner. At the same time, Dante needs to improve its complaint resolution policy by creating a set of best practices in managing the relationship with platform participants.
We remind you that, from this year, the European Regulation (2019/1150) on the promotion of fairness and transparency applies to companies that use the services of online platforms and online search engines. The regulation, also called Platform to Business – P2B, aims to create a competitive, fair and transparent online environment by imposing a set of specific obligations. Thus, among other things, the Regulation stipulates that online platforms must display the "terms and conditions" of use, ensure that they are easily accessible for user companies during all stages of the commercial relationship and transparently present the situations and conditions in which they can suspend , sista or in which they can impose others
restrictions on the provision of services to user companies. Online platforms must also display general information on how the terms and conditions affect the ownership and control of the intellectual property rights of the user firms.”
