At the beginning of the establishment of the Internet, enterprises began to layout in the spirit of connectivity. However, with the continuous extension of commercial tentacles, the giants have built a crisscross ecosystem and erected barriers in many vertical fields, and the Internet ecosystem shows a centralized trend.
However, with the strengthening of supervision, the Internet field began to break down barriers and tear down walls together. Recently, events such as Taobao Tiaoyin interconnection, JD payment and WeChat payment interconnection have made the public see that the speed and strength of Internet wall breaking and cooperation are also increasing.
Wall demolition acceleration
In the history of Internet development, there was a period of experience of erecting walls. The super platforms are constantly building barriers in service, and the platform is gradually "isolated", which makes the phenomenon of mutual blocking links of other platforms, not opening to search engines, and so on more and more serious. For example, the link of platform B cannot be opened in platform A, and the content of platform D cannot be found in platform C, which has caused a lot of inconvenience for users to quickly obtain network information.
With the promotion of actions and policies such as the "Internet Industry Special Rectification Action" and the "Regulations on the Prohibition of Internet Unfair Competition (Draft for Public Comments)", the phenomenon of "islanding" of the platform is gradually disintegrating.
For example, on May 17, the "Taobao Star Task" of Alibaba Mama's Ecological Content Marketing Center and a huge number of star maps launched in-depth cooperation, and the two sides jointly launched the online solution of full link content marketing, the "Star Cube Plan". This also means that merchants can more intuitively track the effect of "dithering grass, Taobao transaction".
Industry insiders believe that the release of the plan at the important promotion moment of Tmall 618 means that the link of "Tiao Yin Da Ren planting grass and Taobao Tmall platform transaction" becomes more smooth.
JD and WeChat are also promoting connectivity. On May 20, JD Pay and WeChat payment official announced that they will be interconnected recently. JD Pay has also become the first third-party payment institution in the industry to connect WeChat personal code and business code at the same time. In terms of user scale, market information shows that the number of JD payment users exceeds 500 million, while the number of WeChat payment users exceeds 1 billion.
According to the Associated Press of Finance, some analysts believe that this interconnection provides a basis for the integration of the two major user platforms in the payment industry, and also sets a precedent for the first large-scale commercial promotion cooperation and interconnection in the industry. From the perspective of the industry, this is another new progress in connectivity after last year's WeChat payment personal code interworking with China Mobile's "Hebao App", China Telecom's "Wing Payment App" and China Unicom's "WoWallet App".
Meng Yishan, an Internet analyst, believes that the "islanding" of Internet platforms will lead to the duplication of platform content and services, which will not only reduce the circulation of information, but also increase the supply costs of content producers, and will also cause inconvenience to users. "The promotion of connectivity by various platforms also means that it has become a consensus to promote healthy competition and break information barriers. If the connectivity between platforms is good in the long run, all participants will probably gain from it."
Interconnection has become a trend
In fact, the "wall" between Internet enterprises began to be erected with the extension of commercial tentacles. Enterprises built a crisscross ecosystem, shielding each other in the vertical field from time to time in the past.
The "3Q War" first attracted widespread attention. From 2010 to 2014, the two companies staged a series of Internet wars to compete for users, and embarked on the road of litigation; In the middle of 2019, an open letter from Galanz, a household appliance enterprise, revealed the secret of "choosing one from the other" in the e-commerce field; In August 2020, users complained that Meituan takeout could not use Alipay, which attracted public attention; In February 2021, Douyin submitted a petition to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court to sue Tencent.
Under the closed loop of platform ecology, the "city wall" of circle flow pool is built higher and higher. The change took place in 2021, when "connectivity" and "opening the outer chain" became the most influential topics in the second half of 2021.
On July 26, 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched the "Internet Industry Special Rectification Action" for half a year, proposing to focus on the rectification of malicious blocking of website links and interference with the operation of other enterprises' products or services, including the scenes of restricting normal access to other website links without justified reasons, and implementing discriminatory shielding measures.
On August 17 of the same year, the State Administration of Market Supervision and Administration issued the Regulations on Prohibiting Unfair Competition on the Internet (Draft for Public Comments), which for the first time listed "malicious blocking of website links", "malicious incompatibility" and other acts as unfair competition and explicitly prohibited them.
Since then, the basic policy direction of connectivity has become clear. Subsequently, the relevant departments of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Central Cyberspace Office and other departments also successively asked the giants to break barriers and shake hands with each other. Since then, Internet giants have begun to tear down the wall slowly, and interconnection has become a trend.
For example, mobile payment, as the basic digital facility, has played the role of consumer transaction application hub for a long time in the past. But before that, the problem of "payment non intercommunication" did exist. Before JD payment and WeChat payment were interconnected, the interconnection of Taobao and WeChat payment attracted public attention.
In February of this year, the "Taobao partial orders or jump to WeChat payment" event hit the hot search. At that time, Taobao customer service responded that the WeChat payment function was only open to some users, and only supported the selection when purchasing some goods. In the future, this function will gradually cover all users. At that time, Li Daokui, president of the China Institute of Economic Thought and Practice, Tsinghua University, said on his microblog that "the interconnection of all major platforms benefits consumers and China's economy".
How far is the interconnection?
In recent years, Internet giants are moving towards connectivity. For example, on September 25, 2023, Ali Mama announced that it would further deepen its cooperation with Tencent Advertising. Through Ali Mama's UD effect ads, high-quality advertising traffic such as WeChat video accounts, circles of friends, and applets can directly jump to Taobao and Tmall stores, product details, and Taobao live broadcast rooms. The cooperation between WeChat and Taobao has become one of the important traffic sources of Taobao on the eve of Double 11.
For another example, in April 2023, Douyin and Tencent Video reached a cooperation, and the two sides launched exploration around the joint promotion of short and long videos and the secondary creation of short videos. In 2024, the official Weibo of King Glory released a message that the live broadcast of King Glory will be fully open from January 21.
Why do giants start to connect? "After years of PK, Internet giants find it hard to take advantage of each other's advantageous areas, so they simply compete with each other and cooperate with each other." Li Jinqing, an analyst of BDA Consulting, once said, "When it comes to business lines, the signal is more obvious according to business needs rather than the group's will."
Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iMedia Consulting Group, also pointed out that the incremental users of the Internet have basically disappeared. After the incremental users are converted into stock users, the incremental user groups of all platforms must be mined from peers. He believes that it is unrealistic for enterprises to break through the performance bottleneck only by innovating their own products and business models. Strengthening connectivity is a necessary move to seek incremental growth.
However, even though remarkable progress has been made in the interconnection between platforms, and some attempts have been made in ecological circles, it is undeniable that some business barriers between platforms, including payment systems, have not been completely broken through.
Why is interconnection difficult? The industry believes that interconnection is not only a matter of technology, operation and pattern, but also requires a large amount of resources to achieve in a real sense.
Liu Chiping, president of Tencent, said at a performance briefing in 2021: "Tencent's ecological environment is open in nature, but different platforms have different systems. For example, unlike other platforms, we will not charge additional commissions from merchants. The connection between platforms is a very complex problem. If these problems are not handled properly, it will be detrimental to our users, many small and medium-sized brand merchants and merchants on the platform. Therefore, we will handle these problems very carefully. "
In the opinion of Pan Helin, co director and researcher of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Center of the International Union Business School of Zhejiang University, the ideal "connectivity" should be fair and open, and openness should not be limited to products and services, but also include data openness. Of course, data opening refers to opening to third-party small technology companies under the condition of ensuring data security, so as to prevent large platform enterprises from taking advantage of data advantages to form competitive advantages over small and medium-sized enterprises and hinder the development of small enterprises. Therefore, the interconnection of platform economy enterprises can not be the interconnection between platforms, but the interconnection of the first open mode to small and medium-sized enterprises. In the future, it is more ideal to consider fairness and then move to a large platform. At the same time, it needs to be emphasized that connectivity should not be between two enterprises, but the fairness and openness of enterprises to all enterprises.
Comprehensive self financing news agency, Shangguan News, Beijing News, etc
