China’s tech companies have been given a month to fix anti-competitive practices and publicly pledge to follow the rules or risk suffering the same fate as ecommerce group Alibaba, which was fined $2.8 billion on the weekend, reported the Financial Times.
China’s market and internet regulators and the tax administration issued the ultimatum at a meeting on Tuesday with the country’s 34 leading tech companies, including Tencent, ByteDance, Meituan and Alibaba.
In a statement, the regulators said they looked on China’s online “platform economies” positively, but wanted to use the “cautionary case of Alibaba” to warn other companies.
The move represents one of the biggest attempts yet by China’s regulators to break up a range of monopolistic behaviors among Chinese internet groups, many of which have created siloed fiefdoms designed to trap customers and merchants within their internet ecosystems, said the FT.
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