China's newly amended anti-unfair competition law took effect at the beginning of the new year. A key part of the measure focuses on on-line competition between Internet shops. What does it all mean for Internet businesses? Mi Jiayi reports.

The newly amended law was adopted after a third reading by the top legislature at the bimonthly session of its Standing Committee in November. Proper online market competition is one of the highlights of the revision. The law states that e-commerce operators should neither deceive nor mislead consumers by faking sales volumes or user comments, which has been a common complaint about many companies in the past.

CUI LILI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR INSTITUTE OF E-COMMERCE, SUFE "In the past, newly opened stores would try use shortcuts to gain credit ratings for themselves, by faking their sales record. This is against the law, and by making that more clear, it raises the cost of breaking the law for stores like these. Also, some service providers had been making intimidating phone calls to customers to make them change their bad reviews into good ones. That's also going to change under the new regulation. This is definitely good news for customers."

Cui says the new law will also affect some internet celebrities who lend their names to product promotions. The revision also says that business operators cannot use technical means to influence Internet users' decisions or to disturb or sabotage products and services legally provided by other operators. One lawyer says we should expect changes in the industry pretty soon.

RYAN TANG, SENIOR PARTNER ALLBRIGHT LAW OFFICES "I think we will see the effect of the new revisions very soon. It's worth noting that the punishment for breaking the law has changed a lot. In the past, the upper limit of most fines was only 200,000 yuan. But now some of the maximum fines are two or three million yuan. The overall trend of the regulations is to become much more strict, so we will see the results of this new law very soon."

Tang says the newly amended competition law will work well with the China's anti-monoply law and advertising law, to help better regulate the overall business sector. The previous anti-unfair competition law took effect in 1993, and this is the first time it has been amended.