Economic Law and The Development of Digital Markets, between Ethics and Efficiency

Market digitalisation leads law to transpose traditional concepts of economic regulation to another theoretical and practical level. Through the legal balance among ordo-liberal and protectionist approaches, public powers seek to functionalize digital economy to socio-economic development purposes. However, such functionalization is inherently connected to supervision and control over online markets. The object of such evolutionary processes comes to be the relationship between legal subjects. The orientation and the transparency of the online legal relationship represent one of the most advanced goals of modern economic law, attempting to neutralize, through regulation, the inevitable information asymmetry distancing each of the subjects involved from the whole system. The paper, mainly focusing on certain recent developments in the legal systems of the PRC and the EU will attempt to sketch the relevant issues and some possible solutions.