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Tencent Holdings’ WeChat is now allowing direct access to external site links in peer-to-peer chat, piloting the practice in group chat, the Chinese messaging app giant said on its official account on November 29.
It will promote interconnections with other internet platforms under guidelines of Chinese regulatory authorities, WeChat added in the statement.
Screenshot of the statement
WeChat users can directly visit e-commerce websites such as Taobao, which belongs to e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding, via a link in a WeChat group rather than copying and pasting the link to a browser.
This is the first time that WeChat and Taobao have been interconnected after blocking each other for nearly eight years. Alibaba had yet to respond to Tencent’s move as of press time.
WeChat’s decision comes after the State Administration for Market Regulation said on Aug. 17 that blocking legal internet products or services without valid reasons is unfair competition.
Relevant departments of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology held an administrative guidance meeting in September and put forward specific regulatory requirements on internet platforms blocking each other’s website links. They ordered the platforms to lift the blockade as per standards and within a required time-frame.
In response, WeChat revealed on Sept. 17 that it would allow users to visit external websites, such as Taobao and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, through links in peer-to-peer chat.
Tit-for-Tat
Mutual blocking among Chinese internet platforms started in 2008. Taobao took the lead to announce the blocking of Baidu Spider on Sept. 8 that year, meaning search results on Baidu would show no commodities on Taobao.
Taobao explained at the time that it wanted to prevent illegal merchants from gaining consumers’ trust by using Baidu’s paid listing and search optimization tools.
In July 2013, Alibaba announced the suspension of WeChat-related third-party application services and cut all access to WeChat data. Soon afterwards, it banned Taobao sellers from posting WeChat QR codes.
In November of that year, WeChat users, who could not visit Taobao’s website via a link in WeChat, were led to a download page for the Taobao app and thus could no longer buy commodities from Taobao on WeChat.
WeChat and Douyin have also blocked each other. Douyin filed a lawsuit in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court in February, claiming that Tencent was indulging in monopolistic behavior by abusing its market dominance to exclude and restrict rivals.
The short-video app giant argued that Tencent’s actions were against the provisions of the Anti-Monopoly Law because it restricted WeChat and QQ users from sharing content from Douyin. It asked the court to order Tencent to stop the practice immediately and pay CNY90 million (USD14.12 million) in compensation.
Tencent has banned six products of ByteDance Technology, the owner of Douyin, affecting more than 1 billion users, according to a report released by ByteDance.
NB: Some users have said that third party links such as from Taobao are still blocked, to this, WeChat team responded that the features will be available to all users soon. As there are more than a billion WeChat users, updates take a little while to cover all users.
SOURCE: YICAI
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