Lei Man said: In December 22, Alibaba was put on file for investigation because of the "two-choice" incident; After more than three months of investigation, today, the State Administration of Market Supervision imposed a fine of 18.228 billion yuan on Alibaba, a huge amount, which is rare in the commercial history of China. This amount is a fine of 4% of its sales in China in 219 of 455.712 billion yuan.

According to the survey, since 215, Alibaba Group has abused its dominant position in this market, put forward a "two-in-one" requirement for the merchants in the platform, prohibited the merchants in the platform from opening stores or participating in promotional activities in other competitive platforms, and adopted various reward and punishment measures to ensure the implementation of the "two-in-one" requirement with the help of market forces, platform rules, data and algorithms, so as to maintain and enhance its own market power and gain unfair competitive advantage. According to the State Administration of Market Supervision, Alibaba Group's "two-for-one" behavior excludes and restricts the competition in the online retail platform service market in China, hinders the free circulation of commodity services and resource elements, affects the innovation and development of the platform economy, infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of merchants in the platform and harms the interests of consumers.

In the commercial field, the "two-choice-one" is far more than that. Not long ago, Lei Man just interpreted the "Take-away" two-choice-one "first case verdict". Earlier, it also detailed the "two-for-one" phenomena in the business field. Here's an old article:

"Two Choose One"

Over the past few years, "two choose one" is far from being as simple as e-commerce businesses standing in line, but extends to almost all fields of e-commerce upstream and downstream and industrial chain. In other fields, the alternative also happens from time to time, such as take-away, which includes merchants, logistics, users and so on.

The earliest "one-to-two" battle between 36 and Tencent in China was in 21. In that year, Tencent gave its 1 billion users two choices:

QQ will stop running or uninstall 36 software before logging in.

This is the first case in the history of Internet in China. A few years later, "choose one from two" began to be abused on a large scale in China's economic market.

1

The worst abuse of "choose one from two" is in the field of e-commerce, where merchants are forced to stand in line.

In 213, JD.COM launched a price war in the home appliance industry, requiring merchants to choose one side station. At that time, Suning, who was mainly engaged in electrical appliances, accused JD.COM of not "forcibly locking the backstage of merchants and forcibly pulling merchants to participate in sales promotion", and called this hegemonic behavior-

"unheard of in the past 3 years".

the tide turns. Two years later, in November, JD.COM reported Alibaba to the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, accusing Alibaba of asking merchants:

If they participate in the "Double Eleven" main venue of Taobao Tmall Mall, they can't participate in the venue activities of other platforms; For those who have reached cooperation intentions with other platforms, they should directly withdraw, otherwise they will be sanctioned or punished in terms of traffic.

In July, 217, JD.COM and Vipshop issued a joint statement accusing Tmall of forcing merchants to stand in line to "choose one from the other". Then the day after tomorrow, the cat issued a statement mocking the opponent for "touching porcelain competition" and misleading the public with "one of two choices" when encountering competition. By the way, he also ridiculed his opponent's "locking the business background, launching commodity prices, and forcing sales promotion" and "doing fake platforms in the name of platforms".

In 219, the "choose one from two" continued to be staged, because Tmall asked Galanz to "choose one from two" and Galanz took Tmall to court.

E-commerce has a history of "choosing one from the other" for several years. Among them, the most interesting thing is the mutual tearing between platforms. For example, JD.COM, who had given electrical appliance merchants a choice, turned around and was given a choice by Tmall. When JD.COM accused Tmall of unfair competition, Tmall told its opponent that "choose one from the other" was a normal market behavior.

I don't know if it's normal or not. Anyway, businesses and consumers have been made abnormal.

2

In 217, "choose one from two" spread to the field of logistics. In June this year, SF announced that it would close the data interface for rookie, which was criticized by rookie. Subsequently, SF Express stated that it was the rookie who took the lead in attacking and banning HIVE BOX, in order to make SF Express switch from using Tencent Cloud to Alibaba Cloud.

in 218, the alternative will be extended to "electronic face sheet" or the field of express logistics. In June of that year, JD.COM refused to deliver the rookie electronic face sheet. Merchants are required to use JD.COM Unbounded Electronic Face Sheet or the electronic face sheet of the courier company that settled in JD.COM Open Platform. Merchants who do not use electronic face sheets according to the specifications may affect the performance efficiency.

At that time, in the electronic face-to-face list camp,

the dispute of electronic face-to-face list was actually a dispute of "logistics data". After the platform party got these data, it established the seller cloud and logistics cloud service system.

in October this year, the U.S. government released a 45-page report on the results of an anti-monopoly investigation, accusing "Amazon has a significant and lasting market dominance in the online retail market in the United States, and has formed a monopoly on third-party sellers in the market."

one of the manifestations of the U.S. government's accusation of Amazon's monopoly is that Amazon has also used the advantages of the platform to set up huge barriers in logistics and cloud services, preventing its cloud service competitors and logistics competitors such as Federation and UPS from entering the third-party seller market.

this is like a mirror, which clearly shows the crux of the "two-choice" problem of domestic logistics.

3

In 218, "one of two choices" was wrapped in "mobile payment", and trillions of netizens were involved.

In March this year, Wal-Mart went offline with Alipay payment function, which only supported WeChat payment and other card payments. At that time, Wal-Mart was a retail group that Tencent openly cooperated with. Then, it was revealed that JD.COM and Tencent's shareholding in BBK was prohibited from using Alipay in its stores. Subsequently, as a counterattack, Ali's Box Horse Fresh announced that it could only use Alipay to pay.

at that time, it was the time when AliPay and wechat payment were hot.

compared with Tencent, Alibaba's social interaction is short board, and Tencent's e-commerce is short board. In the payment market, Alipay occupied 53.78% market share in 218, and WeChat payment occupied 38.87% market share. At that time, the domestic traffic share peaked, and the two companies could only grab the stock market. Offline shopping was the scene they were fighting for at that time.

Offline payment is not only a dispute between users, but also a dispute over retail data. Offline retail enterprises are most worried about the payment institution obtaining the user data resources of offline retail enterprises from the payment interface.

Whatever the reason, hundreds of millions of netizens can only "choose one from the other" in this giant fight, and what is sacrificed is the user's mobile payment experience.

Later, some shopkeepers refused to pay in cash, which was much worse than the alternative.

choosing one from the other is a typical unfair competition. The relationship between merchants, platforms and buyers is mutually beneficial. However, in the market battle for platforms and platforms, merchants or buyers are forced to cling to one and crowd out the other, becoming thugs or chess pieces in market competition.

we are the best at making chess pieces.

4

In the field of take-away, merchants complained that Meituan's "one of two choices" was flooding the Internet.

In March last year, Tongjiang County Market Supervision Administration of Sichuan Province fined Feida Company, which was responsible for the local promotion of Meituan takeaway, 25, yuan.

in the same month, the merchants in Changzhi, Shanxi province broke the news that the Meituan take-out required the merchants to close other take-out platform stores, but the merchants did not close as requested by the Meituan, and the distribution area was actually set in the reservoir.

In 218, according to media reports, Didi Takeaway began to operate in Wuxi, and local merchants who settled in Didi Takeaway received a warning from Meituan. If they continued to do Didi Takeaway, their service ports would be stopped.

We can still see ourselves in the US government's anti-monopoly report on Amazon.

In the anti-monopoly report of the United States, the anti-monopoly committee commented on Amazon, saying that it is using great power to squeeze the third-party merchants selling on the platform:

"For many sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state, and sellers are more worried about the handling of Amazon's' court' than publicly hearing these closed stores in the actual court. It is very unimaginable for this situation to happen in the United States, a sovereign country.

In enterprises, the "trial" of merchants is a typical "referee" and "athlete", and more often, it is like an athlete wearing a referee vest.

5

From the economic point of view, "platform" is the product of enterprise innovation and technology research and development, and enterprises have intellectual property rights to "exclusive property rights" with the unique resources of its platform, flow and technology, which is a kind of intellectual property protection and self-motivation for early innovation and technology investment.

However, there is an upper limit and a boundary to protect property rights. In his Background Report on Competition, Monopoly and Regulation-Anti-monopoly Policy, economist Zhou Qiren said that the principle of government's protection of property rights is to protect the exclusive right of property owners to choose their own resources, provided that such exclusive rights do not prevent others from exercising their property rights.

Let's look back at the "one-to-two" competition of e-commerce. The platform requires sellers to reject another platform to promote sales and occupy the market, which infringes on the property rights or trading rights of sellers and buyers.

The "one-to-two" behavior in the market is full of threats and inducements, either luring the merchant team with sufficient resources, traffic support and commission reduction or ranking.

for merchants, selling goods on multiple platforms is of course a win-win situation. "Lure" prevents merchants from selling goods on other platforms, which is often a "contract agreement". However, "bullying" is more about hooliganism, and this "exclusive right" prevents merchants from exercising their trading rights.

"Monopoly" is a big hat, and Lei Man dare not misuse it easily. Professor Zhou Qiren said that "monopoly" can be simply said that there is only one buyer or seller in a product market. Therefore,

"choose one from two" is terrible, but it is even more terrible to have no choice.