“On February 2, Jitterbug, a subsidiary of ByteDance, filed a formal complaint with the Beijing Intellectual Property Court against Tencent for monopolization.
Jitterbug claims that Tencent’s restriction of users’ sharing of content from Jitterbug through WeChat and qq constitutes a “monopolistic act of abuse of dominant market position to exclude or restrict competition” as prohibited by the Anti-Monopoly Law. Jitterbug asked the court to order Tencent to immediately stop this act, publish a public statement to eliminate the negative impact, and compensate Jitterbug for economic losses and reasonable costs of 90 million yuan.
“We have not received any relevant materials about Jitterbug’s lawsuit against our company for the Time being.” In the evening of February 2, Tencent responded to the reporter of International Finance News as follows.
“The war between Tencent and ByteDance
The contradiction between Tencent and ByteDive can be said to have a long history, after a number of business competition and public opinion exchanges, in June 2018, Tencent had been suspected of unfair competition, byteDive, behind the headlines, Jitterbug, microcast vision sued, while terminating the cooperation with the headline system. At the same time, the headline system also sued Tencent in court for the same reason. This is the official prelude to the “head-to-head war”!
Now three years have passed, the “head-to-head war” seems to be quiet, but the battle is not over.
According to Jitterbug’s lawsuit, instant messaging applications have become the largest Internet user base, with the highest penetration and usage rates. The number of monthly active users of WeChat and QQ exceeds 1.2 billion and 600 million, respectively, which, together with their instant communication and sharing functions and network effects, dictate that it is almost impossible for users to migrate en masse. In addition, there is no other operator in the market that can provide a service with equivalent functionality to WeChat and QQ. According to Jitterbug, this means that Tencent “has a dominant position in the market”.
Jitterbug believes that Tencent’s banning of Jitterbug is a symptom of abuse of its dominant market position. The ban not only undermines users’ rights and interests and disrupts the normal operation of Jitterbug’s products and services, but also excludes and restricts market competition, “which hinders technological progress and innovation and does not contribute to improving economic efficiency and social welfare, but only helps it distort competition in other fields and consolidate its existing market position. “.
“Setting certain ‘barriers’ (not necessarily direct blocking, but requiring one or two more parts of the conversion process) to friendly content sharing on one’s own turf, thus avoiding the abduction of user traffic within one’s own platform, is itself a common phenomenon among Internet platforms, weak when hoping to get unlimited When you are weak, you hope to get unlimited sharing, and when you are strong, you hope to not lose traffic. However, such behavior itself will also bring negative effects on the user experience of their own platform, so such ‘obstacles’ of the platform are in the balance wood, relatively restrained, and as far as possible to go in the state of enhancing the user experience or at least the negative effect of the user experience is minimal.” Zhang Shule, an industry commentator, told the International Financial Times.
According to Zhang Shule, Jitterbug’s lawsuit is also a kind of solution, that is, when Jitterbug needs more social sharing to expand its influence, it tries to reach an “unlocking condition” through lawsuit, even if the possibility of winning the lawsuit is not great.
“We have not received any material about Jitterbit’s lawsuit against us yet.” Tencent then responded, saying that Tencent and its products follow the concept of fair competition and open cooperation to provide services to users and third-party products. The allegations made by Byte Jumping are purely untrue and malicious false accusations.
For its part, Tencent said that a number of Byte Jump’s products, including Jitterbug, have violated the rules of the platform by illegally obtaining personal information of WeChat users through various unfair competition methods, and have been required by multiple court injunctions to immediately stop infringing. “ByteDive and related companies also have many illegal and unlawful acts that violate the ecology of the platform and the rights and interests of users. We will continue to file lawsuits.”
In response to Tencent’s response, Jitterbug released a statement on the evening of February 2, saying that users have absolute and fully controllable rights to their own data, which should be far superior to the rights of the platform and should not become Tencent’s “private property”. Jitterbug also said it hoped the lawsuit would help clarify how to regulate competition in the platform economy and improve anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition regulations.
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