Is the interconnection between Internet giants a forced choice of the old era or a new pattern in a new stage?
Taobao is gradually opening up WeChat payments. Recently, several netizens found that some Taobao orders can be directly redirected to WeChat Pay for payment. The interconnection between Internet giants seems to have taken another step forward.
China's Internet industry has been involved in disputes for more than ten years. Since Taobao banned Baidu in 2008, top platform companies have cut off access links to each other and built a "walled garden". The Internet industry, which was originally based on the value of "openness and sharing", has many fortresses and ravines. Internet companies belonging to different factions are building their own business models and interest rules in their respective fields.
In the context of macro antitrust narratives in 2021, interconnectivity became the most important move of the year. In September 2021, the author exclusively reported that on the afternoon of September 9th, the relevant business departments of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology held an administrative guidance meeting on the issue of blocking website links. At the meeting, it was proposed that all platforms must be unblocked according to standards within the deadline. Since then, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology held a press conference on September 13, emphasizing that "connectivity is an inevitable choice for high-quality development of the Internet industry", setting the tone for connectivity.
It has been nearly 4 years since the beginning of the era of interconnectivity. During this period, the journey was difficult and there were also some achievements. This includes that on September 17, 2021, WeChat will remove the blocking measures for Taobao, Tmall, Tiktok and other website links in the point-to-point (private chat) scenario. Last September, Alibaba Mama and Tencent Advertising further deepened their cooperation. The advertising traffic on WeChat video accounts, Moments, mini programs, and other platforms can be directly redirected to Taobao live rooms, Taobao, Tmall stores, and product details through Alibaba Mama UD effect advertisements.
From the perspective of business logic, interconnection is one of the ways that the Internet must consider when facing the bottleneck of the new stage of development.
In recent years, as the scale of Internet users in China has gradually reached its peak, the logic of industry competition has quietly changed - from incremental user competition to further exploration of stock value, which is especially obvious for the super large platform companies with the highest user volume and market share.
The excavation of stock to a certain extent depends on the improvement of individual user value, including multiple dimensions such as usage duration, consumption items, and willingness to pay. This depends not only on the refinement of user analysis capabilities, but also on the improvement and innovation of the platform's own functional positioning. Among them, the former can expand user data acquisition channels and analysis dimensions through interconnectivity, while the latter can also build cross platform new businesses with other ecosystems through interconnectivity.
Although the process of interconnection itself is bound to be accompanied by friction and vibration caused by the collision of giants, referring to the cases of Alipay WeChat applet and Tomato Fiction's built-in audio tape and advertising, platform giants with diversified businesses who are willing to channel and build functions between their different products have long been familiar with the "1+1> 2" effect of business flow convergence.
Returning to Taobao itself, in recent years, with the increasing pressure of its own business and the trend of independent development of Ali's businesses, especially the further independence of Alipay from the Ali system, Taobao is making more market-oriented decisions. Even Taobao, which has been an e-commerce giant for many years, inevitably needs to break through the barriers that have already been formed, obtain new development potential through the free flow of traffic, and enhance understanding and service capabilities for users.
Of course, for platforms, interconnectivity undoubtedly requires multiple costs such as development, operation, and even business changes, which require weighing and trade-offs between gains and losses. It should be noted that the rights and interests of small and medium-sized platforms with lower bargaining power should be effectively protected in the process of interconnection, and a reasonable mechanism for distributing benefits should be established to change the fairness distortion of large platforms.
At the beginning of this year, after being rejected by the US High Court for appeal, Apple had to open up the option to allow developers to guide customers to other payment methods, which to some extent achieved "connectivity" and "connectivity". But Apple immediately reversed the revised App Store guidelines, requiring that in addition to charging a profit of 27% through third-party payment links, apps that connect to third-party payment links also need to proactively submit monthly billing statements to Apple before the 15th, in order to charge developers a share based on the billing.
The billing statement not only involves profit distribution, but also the core data of the application itself. If forced to disclose this data to Apple, it is difficult to ensure that it is not further restricted by platform rules and resource allocation in operation, thereby further enhancing Apple's monopoly ability.
Taking this as a lesson, "connectivity" should be based on the development logic of the Internet industry of mutual benefit and equal cooperation in essence. In order to ensure the trade secrets and rights of participants of different sizes and different industrial chain positions, in addition to encouraging attempts to break barriers between large platforms, it is also necessary to pay attention to the interests of small and medium-sized platforms, and protect the fairness and innovation vitality of market interaction.
In the context of the booming construction of the data element market and artificial intelligence industry, ensuring the safe and efficient utilization of data resources, as well as the fair and open market transaction mechanism based on this, is not only an inevitable requirement for industrial development, but also an ecological foundation for further expanding the data market after small and medium-sized enterprises gain growth space, consolidating the achievements of "interconnectivity" and providing platforms and markets with more diverse data dimensions.
The Internet industry seems to be entering the traditional industry sequence after several twists and turns. It is impossible to verify whether connectivity can solve the midlife crisis. But it is certain that data, as an important raw material in the era of artificial intelligence, is of great significance. High quality data held by various Internet platforms can play a role in model training, business models, product applications, etc. If there is a good circulation and sharing mechanism, rights protection mechanism, breaking down industry data barriers, it may promote the "second spring" of traditional large factories, and also promote the entire artificial intelligence industry to take a big step forward.