The Alibaba case: an open sesame to China’s antitrust regulation on the Internet platforms

Abstract

China’s e-commerce titan Alibaba was fined CNY 18.2 billion (approx EUR 2.3 billion) on 10 April 2021, setting a new record for antitrust fine in China.1 It took only 108 days for the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), China’s antitrust authority, to complete this abuse of dominance case after it carried out an unprecedented scale of dawn raid in Alibaba’s headquarters on 24 December 2020. The Alibaba case marked a watershed in the development of Chinese antitrust enforcement against Internet platforms. The time in which the Internet market can flourish with barely any antitrust curb forever ended and a new era of high-pressure scrutiny on Internet companies has started. This article will first introduce the evolution of Chinese government’s regulatory policy towards the Internet sector and then provide some insights on the Alibaba case. For new industries and new business models, the Chinese government adopts an accommodative and prudential regulatory policy. This means that the government will not immediately embark on solving the problems brought about by new industries and new business models but will wait for some time to see how things develop. In 2017, e-commerce was named by Premier Li Keqiang as an example of such new things.2