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. After investigation, CNKI is dominant in the Chinese academic literature online database service market in China. Since 2014, CNKI has abused its dominant position to carry out monopoly. The first 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 second is to restrict academic journal publishing units and colleges and universities by signing exclusive cooperation agreements for authorizing 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, constitutes the behavior of 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".

Based on 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 CNKI, on December 26, 2022, the State Administration for Market Regulation made an administrative penalty decision in accordance with the law, ordered CNKI to stop illegal activities, and imposed a fine of 5% of its domestic sales of 1.752 billion yuan in China in 2021, 87.6 million yuan in total. At the same time, sticking to equal emphasis on legal regulation and promotion of development, supervising CNKI to fully implement rectification measures and eliminate the consequences of illegal behaviors, and requiring CNKI to carry out comprehensive rectification about the termination of exclusive cooperation, reducing user burdens, and strengthening internal compliance management, etc., to promote the healthy and standardized industry innovation and development.

CNKI responded that on the 26th receiving the "Decision on Administrative Punishment from the State Administration for Market Regulation", they sincerely accept that and resolutely obey the punishment. On the basis of extensive solicitation of opinions, 15 rectification measures have been formulated, including thoroughly rectifying exclusive cooperation, substantially reducing service prices, protecting the legitimate rights and interests of authors, continuously optimizing related services, and comprehensively strengthening compliance construction. It is now announced and accepted social supervision.

From Weizhishu

December 27th, 2022