Why is Uzbekistan's regulatory standard still inaccurate with regard to deception in advertising?

Abstract

An advertising facilitates the transmission of marketing information from producers to consumers and, as a result, influences the purchasing decisions of customers. Therefore, each manufacturer tries to persuade consumers on certain product characteristics, but the persuasive information can become deceptive when manufacturer attempts to manipulate consumers. Since deception creates unfair advantages for its distributer and misleads consumers by affecting their purchasing decision, the government has to regulate misleading advertising by setting legal standards concerning deception. Deception standard was originated in the USA and has been implemented in other legal systems. However, the US standard is not applicable to Uzbekistan due to the specific legal concept, so-called improper advertising, which contains elements unrelated to deception. The formation of non-deception elements was a result of misunderstanding of the commercial speech doctrine and consumerism issues. The enforcement authority is unwilling to exclude non-deception elements from deception standard because their existence in the legal framework provides administrative interest to keep control over advertising. Moreover, the ambiguous legal framework of improper advertising gives the enforcement agency an opportunity to unreasonably intervene into the commercial speech of entrepreneurs. This situation causes an imbalance of interests in the advertising market. In fact, the government interest to control commercial information flow has become superior to that of competitor and consumer interests. Hence, the main principle of the commercial speech doctrine on the limitation of government intervention does not work in practice. To more actively implement the deception standard in practice, this article suggests the enforcement body to focus on deception rather than non-deception components. The study suggestions can be applicable to Russia and other CIES members as well because they have been dealing with related issues.

Keywords: Uzbekistan, advertising, challenges, consumer interest

DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/133-07

Publication date:June 30^th 2023