Payment Of Web Search Service's Legal Regulation

Payment of web search service is a kind of new network operation mode which is based on search engine technology and takes keyword bidding as the main standard to provide a new network operation mode.The payment of web search service not only brings huge income for search engine providers,but also leads to a series of legal issues,such as intellectual property disputes,false advertising and so on.In recent years,there are more and more cases of illegal acts of the payment of web search service in our country,and the outbreak of "Wei Zexi" incident has once again pushed it to the forefront of public opinion.Before the introduction of the Interim Measures for Internet Advertising Management,the legal nature of the payment of web search service and the legal status of search engine providers have been the focus of controversy.Due to the lack of clear regulations on laws and regulations,administrative law enforcement and judicial decisions were once in chaos.The "Interim Measures for Internet Advertising Management " now clearly stipulates that the payment of web search service has advertising attributes and is officially included in the scope of legal adjustment.However,there are many differences between the payment of web search service and the traditional advertising,and there are also some defects in the practice of its norms in the Advertising Law,so the legal regulation of paid search on the Internet is still necessary to study.This paper mainly discusses from the following three parts.The first part is about the basic theory of the payment of web search service.The payment of web search service is a mode that is different from natural ranking and fixed ranking.It is essential to sort the search results by price.The legal nature of the payment of web search service in academic circles,mainly two opinions of advertising and information retrieval services,but this paper believes that the payment of web search service is an information retrieval service with advertising attributes.Information asymmetry theory,externality theory and interest balance theory constitute the basic theory of the payment of web search service's legal regulation.The second part mainly studies the current situation and problems of the legal regulation of the payment of web search service in China.Sorting out the current effective judgments and relevant legal provisions of the Chinese courts about thepayment of web search service,this paper summarizes the ambiguity based on the content of legislation,and the related laws have difficulties in regulating trademark infringement and unfair competition behaviors.And the operation of advertising supervision mechanism is insufficient.The legal status of service providers,the scope of legal obligations and the issue of the determination of the form of responsibility are not uniform.The third part mainly puts forward some suggestions to improve the legal regulation of the payment of web search service in China.This paper proposes to clarify the legal status of service providers,clarify the content of their review of advertising and set reasonable limits for the performance of legal obligations in China,and then determine the scope of legal liability.Meanwhile,the criteria for “trademark use” and “confusing possibility” should be also clarified to enhance the applicability of the law,and according to the particularity of the operation mode of the payment of web search service,the regulatory mechanism is innovated,then the regulation mode of “Internet + government supervision” will be established.