Today, Tik Tok formally filed a complaint with the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, suing Tencent for alleged monopoly.
Tik Tok argues that Tencent restricts users from sharing content from Tik Tok through WeChat and QQ, which constitutes a ‘monopoly behavior that abuses market dominance and eliminates or restricts competition’ prohibited by the Anti-Monopoly Law.
Tik Tok asked the court to order Tencent to immediately stop this behavior, publish a public statement to eliminate adverse effects and compensate Tik Tok for economic losses and reasonable expenses of 90 million yuan.
As per the report, in April 2018, WeChat and QQ began to ban Tik Tok, and users sharing Tik Tok links to the above platforms could not be played normally. It has been for nearly three years.
However, Tencent’s and other third-party short video applications, such as Weishi and Kuaishou, can be shared and played normally on WeChat.
In the complaint, Tik Tok declared that instant messaging applications have become the basic applications with the largest scale of Internet users, the highest penetration rate, and the highest usage rate.
The monthly active users of WeChat and QQ exceed 1.2 billion and 600 million respectively. Coupled with their instant communication and sharing functions and network effects, it is almost impossible for users to migrate collectively.
Additionally, there are currently no other operators in the market that can provide services equivalent to WeChat and QQ. This means that Tencent ‘has a dominant market position.’
Tik Tok believes that Tencent’s ban on Tik Tok is a sign of abuse of market dominance. The ban not only damages the rights and interests of users, disrupts the normal operation of Tik Tok products and services, but also eliminates and restricts market competition. ‘
Tencent’s monopolistic behavior hinders technological progress and innovation and does nothing to improve economic efficiency and social well-being. It can only help it distort competition in other fields and consolidate its existing market position.”
It is worth noting that Tik Tok sued Tencent for monopoly, which may be closely related to the current Chinese anti-monopoly situation.
At the end of 2020, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the ‘Guidelines for Anti-Monopoly in the Field of Platform Economy (Draft for Comment).’
The document clearly pointed out that red envelope subsidies, brand blocking, ‘choose one of two’, ‘big data acquaintance’, search power reduction, traffic restriction, technical obstacles, etc. may become manifestations of abuse of dominant position, and the platform economy is against Monopoly cases do not necessarily need to define the relevant market.
Prior to this, Tik Tok had repeatedly accused WeChat of blocking Tik Tok links shared by users. In January of this year, Xie Xin, the vice president of ByteDance, stated that due to the closure of the WeChat open platform, the ‘Feishu Document’ WeChat applet has been stuck in the review process for nearly two months.
The other two WeChat applets ‘Flying ‘Book Conference’ and ‘Flying Book’ have also suffered such treatment.
(Via)
