The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) of the PRC has prepared a draft of new rules for antitrust regulation of the technology sector. It provides for a further tightening of the rules for the work of IT companies.
The regulator will collect public comments on the bill until September 15, after which the document may be changed. However, investors in China’s tech companies have already reacted to increasing pressure from the authorities: quotations of IT companies are noticeably declining. So, shares of Alibaba and Tencent today sank 4.6% and 4.2%, respectively. Both companies have already been fined by SAMR this year for violating antitrust laws.
Among the norms spelled out in the bill is a ban on providing false data on the number of clicks on a specific object on the site, a ban on publishing only positive reviews and hiding negative ones, a ban on traffic capture – redirecting to your site while a user is browsing the site of another company, a ban on the use of algorithms and databases to collect and analyze information about the trading activities of competitors.
Many analysts believe that the first wave of pressure from the Chinese authorities on the technology business, which began at the end of last year, against the founder of the Internet giant Alibaba, Jack Ma. Following the investigation, Alibaba was fined $ 2.8 billion for “abuse of dominance.” A new round of pressure on Chinese high-tech began in June when SAMR launched an investigation into local online taxi service Didi Chuxing.
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