Self-Preferencing in Digital Platform Markets: Contractual Inequality and Reformulating MSME Protection in Indonesia

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-565-2_59How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Contractual Inequality; Digital Platforms; Good Faith; MSME Protection; Self-preferencing

Abstract

Digital platform markets have become a central infrastructure of Indonesia’s contemporary economy and transforming contemporary business relations by embedding contractual governance into algorithmic infrastructures. While platforms are commonly perceived as neutral intermediaries, many operate simultaneously as market organizers and competing economic actors. This dual role has facilitated self-preferencing practices, whereby platforms prioritize their own products or services through contractual discretion and algorithmic governance. Against this background, existing legal scholarship in Indonesia has predominantly examined self-preferencing from a competition law perspective, leaving its contractual dimensions and implications for MSME protection underexplored. Responding to this gap, this research employs a normative legal research method with a conceptual approach to analyze self-preferencing as a manifestation of contractual inequality in digital platform markets and examines platform contracts as instruments of private regulation within the Indonesian legal framework, particularly through the principles of freedom of contract, good faith, and contractual balance. The analysis finds that self-preferencing is structurally enabled by asymmetric platform contracts, which are predominantly drafted as standard form agreements. These contracts expose Indonesian MSMEs to economic dependence and market exclusion without any contractual breach. The article concludes that effective MSME protection in Indonesia requires a reformulation of contract law responses through strengthened good faith obligations, limits on unilateral contractual discretion, and explicit recognition of contractual inequality inherent in standard form platform contracts to ensure fairness, legal certainty, and sustainable digital market governance.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Montayana Meher
AU  - Agata Kurniati
AU  - Rosmalinda Rosmalinda
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/30
TI  - Self-Preferencing in Digital Platform Markets: Contractual Inequality and Reformulating MSME Protection in Indonesia
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Social Environment Diversity (ICOSEND 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 494
EP  - 501
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-565-2_59
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-565-2_59
ID  - Meher2026
ER  -