Startup acquisitions are common in the digital economy, and they are different from killer acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry. Startup acquisitions may be horizontal, but more are vertical or conglomerate. after the Acquisition is completed, the acquired product or service is generally integrated into the platform’s ecosystem, so it may bring economic efficiency. The anti-trust law remedies should be set according to the types and damages of the start-up acquisitions. When the acquisition parties are competitors, the antitrust authority may require the acquirer to make commitments of prohibition of “killing” and independent operation, so as to ensure that the acquired products or services remain in the market after the acquisition and weaken the acquirer’s market power brought by the acquisition. When the object of the acquisition includes some important resources, the acquisition may cause anticompetitive foreclosure. In such cases, the authority may require the acquirer to commit to keep the market open. When acquisitions lead to expansion of business lines of the platform and may lead to conflicts of interest, the authority many impose some “functional separations” requirements on the acquirer to isolate the business lines that may cause conflicts of interest from other business lines of the platform. In startup acquisitions involving a large amount of user data, the establishment of an independent “data silo” is an important measure to prevent excessive commercial use of user data. At the same time, users’ freedom of choice must be fully guaranteed. Compared with the above behavioral remedies, the application of structural remedies in startup acquisitions should follow the principle of proportionality. Generally, they are only considered in very specific market structures.
When determining an ex-ante review system of a certain type of regulation, authorities should consider its necessity, feasibility, and principle of separation of powers, while balancing the cost and efficiency of legislation. In the ex-ante review system of regulations in China, the ex-ante reviewing of the regulations of autonomous areas aims to enhance the effectiveness of such regulations, protect the rights and interests of ethnic minorities and safeguard uniformity of the legal system of the multi-ethnic country. The ex-ante reviewing of local regulations in the districted city stems from the limited legislative ability of the districted city, and aims to safeguard uniformity of the legal system in multi-level governments. The ex-ante review of local regulations mainly focuses on the legislative authority and procedures, while for the regulations of autonomous areas, the reviewing authorities not only concern the general part but also examine whether the people’s congress of an ethnic autonomous area have the power to develop regulations of autonomous areas and whether those adaptations are within the categories of allowed items. In practice, the ex-ante review has been developed to an approval mechanism that includes “strict guidance during the informal legislative procedure” and “lenient review in the formal legislative procedure”. During the informal legislative procedure, the legitimacy, democracy, and scientificity of regulations are enhanced through the whole process of participation by all sectors of society, extensive consultation of all the public and unified deliberation by the legislative authorities. Whereas in formal legislative procedures, in practice, reviewing agencies have developed multiple methods such as “approval with revision opinions” and “return for revision and then submit for approval”, which makes the ex-ante review system of regulations more flexible.
The “Nomos and Narrative” theory, proposed by the American constitutional theorist Robert Cover, provides an inspiring perspective to rethink the relationship between legal narrative and legal authority. The constitutional politics of the early Republic of China revealed that the establishment and maintenance of the authority of a specific constitution depends upon two types of narratives: one is the founding epic narrating the origins of the current government and constitution; the other is the narrative exploring how the validity of the constitution extended in the time, with a focus on the disruption and exceptions in the application of the constitution. The constitutional politics of the early Republic of China produced enormous controversies and dilemmas on the two aspects, resulting in the weak authority of the 1912 Constitution（together with its succeeding constitutional documents） and the 1914 Constitution. The exploration of the early republican constitutional politics from the “Nomos and Narrative” perspective could help researchers understand the institutional functions of the constitutional narrative, as well as their own institutional roles in the writing of the constitutional history.
Different from the traditional environmental tort, in the scenario of coming to the nuisance, the polluted area legally exists before the victim enters the polluted area, and the victim should be mainly responsible for the damage result. However, in the current legal system on environment tort, most of the responsibilities must be borne by polluters. Responsibility allocation like this leads to a dual dilemma between theoretical design and social practice. On the one hand, public interests, ecological interests and the interests of the parties should all be manifested in environmental liability, and the interests in victim should not be unfairly emphasized. On the other hand, there have been cases of victim deliberately coming to the nuisance and demanding compensation from enterprises. Under the new era of high-quality development, in order to optimize the responsibility allocation system for coming to the nuisance, firstly, the duty of care to avoid entering the polluted area should be borne by the victim, and the violation of such duty constitutes the fault of the victim. Secondly, the principle of comparative fault can be applied to the no-fault liability system, and the victim shall bear the environmental tort liability corresponding to his fault degree. Finally, it is desirable to carry out an analysis on the typological basis of the victim and establish a data-oriented and standardized responsibility distribution-relief system.
Super-platforms and the digital ecosystem they build have posed an obvious challenge to antitrust law. The European Union has taken the lead in setting a gatekeeper system through the Digital Markets Act. The United States and China plan to regulate the covered platform system and the super-platform system respectively, which have the same institutional core elements and practical logic with those in European Union. The gatekeeper system imposes special legal obligations on specific platform, which simplifies the complicated economic analysis process and presents obvious characteristics of ex-ante control. The regulation-oriented gatekeeper system breaks through the existing post-hoc case analysis paradigm of antitrust law to a certain extent and has potential differences with the traditional antitrust analysis path. China plans to introduce gatekeeper system as a supporting measure of platform antitrust, which may cause the contradiction of regulation and competition. The gatekeeper system should be absorbed and integrated into the antitrust law, so as to address the conflict risk between different systems.
