China’s Clamping Down Control of Alibaba
Suhas Nannapaneni
The Chinese Communist Party is hitting the e-commerce titan Alibaba with a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine as party officials want to send a message to all in the internet industry, watch out because we’ve got our eyes on you. The penalty against Alibaba, the bedrock of the business empire of Jack Ma, is the biggest move yet as China attempts to tighten its control around Big Tech.
Their investigation began in December as to whether Alibaba had broken the country’s antimonopoly law by preventing merchants from selling their goods on other shopping platforms. This fine far exceeds the $975 million antitrust penalty that China imposed on Qualcomm in 2015. China’s the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, called regulation, “a kind of love and care.” The paper’s article went on to say that “monopoly is the great enemy of the market economy” unironically.
Angela Zhang, an associate professor and director of the Center for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong, has said that Alibaba and Tencent are now more likely to be cautious about doing anything that resembles strong-arming users or rivals. Alibaba has stated that “the penalty issued today served to alert and catalyze companies like ours…it reflects the regulators’ thoughtful and normative expectations towards our industry’s development.” Clearly, Alibaba and Jack Ma have gotten the message from the CCP.
Although China is the first to make such a substantial antitrust case against Big Tech, the movement is surely growing in Europe and America against companies like Google and Facebook. In western nations, there is an added aspect that Big Tech has great control over our political messaging as it is home to most political awareness movements such as the Black Lives Matter movements, and the blocking of Donald Trump’s Twitter account following the riot on Capitol Hill earlier this year.
As the high-tech competition grows between China and United States, cases like this will continue to indicate which way the wind is blowing and who is truly in control – the government or Big Tech.