ByteDance is bringing its battle with archrival Tencent to the court at a time when the Chinese government moves to curve the power of the country’s internet behemoths.
The Beijing Intellectual Property Court has permitted a ByteDance lawsuit brought against Tencent to proceed, a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch. Upstart new media company ByteDance alleged that Tencent’s restrictions on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, are in violation of China’s anti-monopoly draft rules. Douyin is headquartered in Beijing while Tencent’s base is in Shenzhen.
For three years, Tencent has blocked Douyin from its flagship networking apps WeChat and QQ, which bans users from viewing or sharing content from the short video app. Tencent’s behavior “no doubt” constitutes “monopolistic behavior achieved by abusing market domination to exclude and limit competition,” which the proposed anti-monopoly law prohibits, Douyin, said.
“We believe that competition is better for consumers and promotes innovation. We have filed this lawsuit to protect our rights and those of our users.”
Tencent said in response the accusation is false and malicious defamation. It further asserted that Douyin, which is used by 600 million users every day, uses illegal and anti-competitive methods to access WeChat’s user data, and it’s planning to sue ByteDance for harming its platform ecosystem and user rights.
ByteDance and Tencent each covet the other’s turf. ByteDance debuted a chat app to take on Tencent’s dominance in social networking, while Tencent countered Douyin’s popularity by introducing a slew of short video apps. Neither has managed to threaten the other’s dominance in their respective field.
Early signs show that the Chinese government is increasingly willing to rein in monopolistic behavior on the Chinese internet following two decades of relatively lax regulations.
In November, the country’s top market regulator unveiled the draft version of its first anti-monopoly law, opening a floodgate to lawsuits and investigations. In December, regulators launched an antitrust probe into Alibaba for forcing vendors to sell exclusively on its platform. Just this month, a court in Beijing imposed a 3 million yuan ($464,000) fine on fashion e-commerce site Vipshop over anti-competitive behavior. It won’t be surprising to see more Chinese internet giants getting hit by anti-trust actions in the upcoming months.
