| | | Of potential benefit to Baidu:
Tearing down China’s other Great Firewall
David Wertime and Zeyi Yang
Protocol
October 20, 2021
Good morning. China reportedly has developed a hypersonic missile, with an August test of the planet-orbiting tech. It's emblematic of the extent to which the tech race is a geopolitical and national security question too.
In this week's Protocol | China: another internal firewall that could soon come down, DingTalk's rise to the top of the workplace heap and Alibaba's fancy new chip.
China's internet is becoming less siloed
While China is becoming more isolated from the digital commons, with the Great Firewall of censorship that surrounds it getting ever higher, its own internet actually seems to be becoming more unified.
The latest wall to potentially fall? Regulators at the powerful Ministry of Industry and Information Technology may soon ask Tencent and ByteDance to make their platforms searchable by third parties, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
-- Currently, to search for content on Tencent's WeChat or ByteDance's Douyin, a user has to go to each platform's own search engines.
-- A new rule could require all results — including "hundreds of millions of articles" on WeChat — to be searchable via third-party platforms like Baidu.
Who would win from this potentially massive change?
-- Baidu would likely benefit the most, as it's China's preeminent search engine, one whose star has dimmed as web users have spent ever more time within WeChat's closed ecosystem.
-- It would also be great news for researchers hoping to better understand China, scholar Graham Webster wrote on Twitter.
-- It's probably a net benefit for young internet companies generally. There are likely great business ideas out there about how to sort and order this new stream of information.
And who would be less enthusiastic about the ramifications? It's not so good for WeChat, or for firms like Pinduoduo focused on "private traffic," which means keeping people locked within WeChat mini apps.
And there are more walls that could fall. Barriers between search engines are just one example of the blockades that regulators want to tear down.
-- Cross-platform link-blocking has kept users within a single ecosystem by making it impossible to "click out."
-- Exclusive agreements have locked vendors into one ecommerce platform and limited their markets.
-- Now both are targeted in rules issued in August by China's powerful State Administration for Market Regulation.
-- Expect more regulatory pushes in 2022 to de-silo China's Internet. Regulators may be calculating that a wave of new innovation awaits if they can loosen Big Tech's hold.
Tearing down China’s other Great Firewall - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech |
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