The Chinese Market Surveillance Authority (SAMR) on Sunday unveiled new antitrust directives targeting Internet platforms that further tighten restrictions already imposed on the country’s technology giants.
The new rules finalize the draft antitrust law, which was published back in November, specifying which monopolistic practices that threaten fair competition in the market are undesirable. Accordingly, they prohibit price fixing, the restriction of technologies and the use of data and algorithms in a way that results in a market-distorting effect. As is well known, it is common practice on e-commerce platforms that sellers selling their products may not advertise on a rival platform.
The guidelines are expected to put further pressure on China’s leading internet service providers, including Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. to rival JD.com, as well as to mobile payment platforms widely used in China, such as Ant Group Alipay and Tencent holding WeChat Pay.
The machine has started
Chinese technology giant ByteDance, known as the developer of TikTok video sharing, announced Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against Chinese technology giant Tencent for monopolistic activity. ByteDance complains that Tencent will not allow users of its messaging applications, WeChat and QQ, to share content from Douyin, also referred to as the Chinese version of TikTok, on the interfaces.
ByteDance as early as 2018 also sued Tencent for anti-competitive conduct, claiming that links from the ByteDance news service could not be shared on some of Tencent’s social platforms. At the same time, Tencent filed a defamation lawsuit against ByteDance, accusing the company of illegally accessing the personal information of WeChat users for some of its products.
China has begun tightening controls on its technology giants in recent months,
In December, the authorities launched an antitrust inquiry into China’s largest e-commerce company, the Alibaba Group, shortly after the suspension of Alibaba’s financial services business.
Ant, the owner of Alipay, the world’s largest online and mobile payment platform, raised $ 37 billion during the share subscription period, making it the largest-ever listing in the world. would have been listed on the stock exchange in early November.