Legal Regulation Of Unilateral Change Clauses In E-Commerce Platforms

E-commerce platform has become an inseparable way of trading in people’s daily life.Merchants in the platform can break the geographical restrictions and provide services for online consumers all over the world with high-quality services.At the same time,as the Internet economy matures,there are many leading enterprises in the Internet platform,When the platform signs a service agreement with the counterpart,it often arbitrarily infringes the legitimate rights and interests of platform merchants and consumers by virtue of its dominant market position.Compared with the traditional format contract,the platform service agreement has the characteristics of continuity,complexity and technicality,and there are differences between them in terms of contract conclusion,change and withdrawal.In particular,the platform side frequently uses unilateral change clauses,and the existing legal provisions on format clauses are difficult to play a role.Based on the problems existing in the current practice and the existing legal system.The article consists of the introduction and the main body.The introduction mainly includes the background of the topic selection and literature review.Firstly,it introduces the reason of the topic selection and the research object of the paper.Secondly,it summarizes the academic viewpoints of scholars at home and abroad and the extraterritorial legal provisions.The second chapter is the basic theory part of the article,which analyzes the clauses from the theoretical basis of their existence and the interpretation of their meanings,and sorts out the formation basis,characteristics,harmfulness,effective conditions and necessity of the clauses.The third chapter of the article analyzes the current legislation and existing problems of unilateral change clauses on e-commerce platforms,and through two cases of disputes caused by unilateral change clauses on platforms in judicial practice,discusses how the judiciary determines the validity of unilateral change clauses in practice,and specifically discusses the existing problems in legislation,which are embodied in the following aspects: the clauses of soliciting opinions and publicity need to be improved,the provisions of special prompt obligation are lacking,the provisions of unilateral cancellation right still need to be improved,and the applicable standards of fair principle are not clear;Absence of supervision,unclear powers of regulatory bodies,etc.The fourth chapter discusses the improvement suggestions of e-commerce law in view of the above-mentioned problems.In order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of enterprises and consumers on the platform,this paper puts forward that the unilateral change clause of e-commerce platform should still adopt the control mode of the format clause in the Civil Code.Through the dual normative thinking of formal regulation and content regulation,the adjudication path of China’s current formal regulation is gradually changed into the regulation mode from formal review to content review centered on content regulation.First,judge whether the platform party has fulfilled its obligation of disclosure and prompting,and whether it has set up a reasonable exit mechanism for the counterparty.If it meets the requirements,then judge the effectiveness of the change clause,and it is necessary to introduce content regulation.On the premise of clearly changing the meaning of the terms,the legality and rationality of its contents are examined in turn according to the specific negative list to the abstract principle of fairness.