Legal Value of Paid Listing Service Providers

The current law has clarified that the legal nature of the paid listing is online advertising, but the legal nature of the paid listing service providers has not yet been clarified. In this issue, there are also disputes in the theoretical and practical community. The mainstream view is that the legal nature of the paid listing service providers is the advertisement publisher, but the article questions this point of view. However, this mainstream view is questioned in this paper. After the Advertising Law and the Interim Measures for Administration on Internet Advertising are analyzed under the legal dogmatics, and after the related legislation and judicial decisions in Europe and America are interpreted, and the paid listing services providers are compared with an analogous Internet platform, the third-party platform for online food trading, this paper comes to the conclusion that the paid listing services providers are online advertising platforms with the legal nature of "Internet information service provider" as stipulated by the Advertising Law and the Interim Measures for Administration on Internet Advertising.