DCC catalogue entry — summary, not full text.
Why this rule matters for the data field
The Rules on Pricing Conduct by Internet Platforms (互联网平台价格行为 规则) were issued jointly by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), and the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on 9 December 2025 and took effect 10 April 2026, with a built-in five-year mandate (Art. 29). At 29 articles across seven chapters, it is primarily a price-regulation and anti-monopoly instrument — grounded in the Price Law, the E-Commerce Law, the AUCL, the Consumer Rights Protection Law, the Cybersecurity Law, and PIPL (Art. 1) — covering how platform operators (平台经营者) and in-platform merchants (平台内经营者) set prices, disclose them, run promotions, and compete on price.
DCC catalogues it as a lighter background entry, in the same style as the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, because one clause reaches directly into data governance: Article 15 is the first codification, at the pricing-regulation level, of a ban on algorithmic price discrimination against existing users (大数据杀熟, literally “big-data killing familiar customers”) — the practice, until now addressed mainly through the Algorithmic Recommendation Provisions and consumer- protection rules, of using a platform’s data holdings on a given user to charge that user more. The rest of this entry uses the shorthand “big-data price discrimination” for readability.
The data-relevant clause — Article 15
Article 15, paragraph 1, tracks (and cross-references) Article 9 of the Implementing Regulations for the Consumer Rights Protection Law. It provides that a platform operator or in-platform merchant may not:
without the consumer’s knowledge, use data and algorithms, platform rules, or similar means, based on information such as a consumer’s willingness to pay, ability to pay, consumption preferences, or consumption habits (支付意愿、支付能力、消费偏好、消费习惯), to set different prices or fee standards for the same good or service under equivalent transaction conditions (同一商品或者服务在同等交易条件下 设置不同的价格或者收费标准).
Two elements do the legal work: equivalent transaction conditions (the comparator — this is not a ban on legitimate segmentation like new-customer discounts or membership tiers priced on service level) and the consumer’s lack of knowledge (the trigger — a platform that discloses its differential-pricing rule up front, per Article 8’s separate transparency duty for differentiated and dynamic pricing, is regulated but not automatically caught by Art. 15). Paragraph 2 adds a parallel, narrower prohibition: a platform operator may not use price discrimination against in-platform merchants (对平台内经营者实施价格 歧视), invoking Article 14(5) of the Price Law.
Article 15 carries no standalone penalty — like the rest of the Rules, violations are enforced through the underlying statutes it cross- references (the Price Law, the Consumer Rights Protection Law Implementing Regulations), with minor and promptly corrected violations eligible for a no-penalty disposition under the Administrative Penalty Law (Art. 26).
The compliance-system hook — Article 24
Article 24 requires platform operators to build an eight-item internal price-compliance system. Two items are squarely data/algorithm obligations:
- Article 24(7) — “strengthen network data security management, and process personal information in price-related conduct in accordance with law and regulation (加强网络数据安全管理，在价格行为中依法依规 处理个人信息)” — i.e., the pricing engine itself (the data pipeline feeding personalized or dynamic pricing) must be built as a PIPL- and Data Security Law-compliant system, not bolted on after the fact.
- Article 24(8) — “lawfully complete algorithm filing procedures related to price conduct, and cooperate with the CAC and other authorities on security assessments and supervisory inspections (依法履行价格行为有关算法备案手续，配合网信等有关部门开展安全评估和 监督检查工作)” — folding algorithm filing into pricing compliance specifically, confirming that a pricing algorithm falls within the filing regime the CAC already administers for recommendation algorithms.
Read together, Articles 15 and 24(7)–(8) mean overseas platforms operating in China should treat their pricing/discount engine as a regulated data system: the underlying personal-information processing needs a lawful basis and minimization discipline, the algorithm needs filing, and the pricing logic itself needs a transparency layer sufficient to keep differentiated pricing out of Article 15’s “without the consumer’s knowledge” trap.
How it fits with other DCC-tracked rules
The Rules sit alongside — rather than inside — DCC’s core data-protection stack. Article 21 of the Algorithmic Recommendation Provisions already prohibited “unreasonable differential treatment” via algorithm in trading conditions; Article 15 now gives that prohibition a pricing-regulator’s teeth and a more precise “equivalent transaction conditions / without knowledge” test. The Anti-Unfair Competition Law’s 2025 data clause (Art. 13) and the Online Trading Platform Rules and Measures cover adjacent platform-conduct ground — merchant treatment, data scraping, transaction-rule fairness — that the Rules’ Article 5 partially overlaps with (bans on forced “automatic price-matching” systems and most-favored-pricing clauses). PIPL remains the governing statute for the personal-information processing that underlies any differentiated-pricing model; Article 24(7) simply confirms that pricing is not exempt from it.
Briefs on this law
DCC briefs that turn on the Platform Pricing Rules are linked from this
page’s “Briefs on this law” section (any post whose laws: references
this entry).