Antitrust Regulation of Exploitative Abuse in the Digital Age: A China-Centred Study

Exploitative abuse, where a dominant firm directly harms consumers or trading partners through unfair prices or unreasonable conditions, has long been a peripheral concern in antitrust law. Enforcement agencies and scholars have focused overwhelmingly on exclusionary abuses, assuming that protecting competition will indirectly prevent exploitation. The digital age disrupts this assumption. Digital platforms, powered by network effects, data concentration, and algorithmic capabilities, engage in novel forms of exploitation that traditional frameworks struggle to address. These new forms include unfair personalised pricing, often described as “big data enabled price discrimination against existing customers”; excessive collection and processing of user data beyond what is necessary for service provision;extraction of consumer attention through addictive interfaces and behavioural manipulation; and imposition of one-sided trading conditions on both consumers and business users. Unlike traditional excessive pricing, these exploitative practices often do not involve a monetary price at all. Consumers pay with their data, attention, or privacy, all of which have economic value but lack transparent market benchmarks. Traditional antitrust tools, such as the consumer welfare standard measured by price and output, become inadequate when exploitation takes non-price forms. Likewise, the conventional reliance on exclusionary abuse enforcement, waiting for competition to be distorted before intervening, fails to address direct, immediate harm to consumers in zero-price or multi-sided digital markets. China presents a particularly important case. Its digital economy is among the largest and most dynamic globally, yet its antitrust framework remains underdeveloped in dealing with digital exploitation. Enforcement practice shows doctrinal confusion: even when cases substantively involve exploitative abuses, agencies often analyse them through the lens of exclusionary abuse, requiring proof of competitive harm that may not exist. This misalignment results in under-enforcement and leaves consumers unprotected. This thesis aims to develop a coherent, theoretically grounded antitrust framework for regulating exploitative abuses in China’s digital age. It adopts an interdisciplinary methodology combining law and economics, using static efficiency (wealth transfer, deadweight loss) and dynamic efficiency (innovation trade-off) as measurable filters for harm, and comparative legal analysis, examining EU and US experiences to extract lessons for China. The research clarifies the definition and harms of digital exploitative abuses, diagnoses the doctrinal and practical obstacles in Chinese enforcement, and proposes a tailored analytical framework with guiding principles for competition authorities. Ultimately, the thesis contributes to the global debate on digital antitrust while offering a context-sensitive solution for China.