There is nothing neutral about your online marketplace — Ong Tze Chin
SEPTEMBER 2 — The recent government’s announcement to expedite the e-commerce bill and to consider registrat...
On September 2, the government announced plans to hasten the e-commerce bill and consider registration requirements for online marketplaces. These platforms are not neutral intermediaries, but powerful gatekeepers that control access to consumers, data, pricing, visibility, and logistics. They extract rental income from ancillary businesses like third-party sellers, manufacturers, and retailers through fees, commissions, and free shipping campaigns.
E-commerce platforms use network effects, data concentration, and control over digital transactions to dictate how businesses access online markets and reach consumers. Through these ecosystems, platforms act as private regulators, governing businesses and consumers as users. This creates a power imbalance, with platforms profiting from algorithmic profiling, automated decision-making, and predictive analytics.
Research from the Faculty of Law at Universiti Malaya has identified competition and consumer harms resulting from e-commerce practices in Malaysia. These include predatory pricing, self-preferencing, algorithmic bias, data asymmetry, algorithmic repricing pressure, fee exploitation, and vertical restraint. The platforms' heavy investment and dependence on big parent companies prioritize expansion and growth over participants' interests, often leading to predatory pricing and other competitive harms.
Additionally, platforms leverage data and AI analytics to create intense price and advertising competition, further distorting the market.
Written by urgent.news from Malay Mail's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
