variety.com
20.01.2022 / 13:05
88%
639
China Orders Entertainment and Tech Firms to Stay in Their Lane
Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefChinese regulators teamed up on Wednesday to issue a volley of orders that will crimp the expansion of the country’s entertainment and tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent and TikTok-owner Bytedance.The directives came in the same week that the U.S. increased its pushback against some of the same Chinese firms, pointing to security concerns, and a Canadian researcher found the app for athletes at Beijing’s Winter Olympics to be full of security flaws.Nine different departments, including China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Cyberspace Administration of China, issued joint statements about how to regulate and tame development of what it labels “the online platform sector.” Prominent among the new policy directives is the strict regulation of the tech companies’ activities and investments in the finance sector.“Platform operators must not use data, technology, market, or capital advantages to restrict the independent operation of other platforms and applications,” said one of the opinions in the NDRC document.That appears to be most problematic for Alibaba and Tencent, which have both hatched vast online transfer, deposit-taking and insurance services.