Accused Of Violating Anti-Monopoly Law, ByteDance Takes Tencent To Court

JAKARTA - The feud between the two giants of China's technology industry ended at the court. ByteDance Ltd. sued Tencent Ltd. on charges of monopolizing WeChat and the QQ platform.

The suit comes months after the Chinese government announced a bill aimed at rooting out monopoly among internet companies and sparking sales in the tech sector. Based on a Bloomberg report, the report filed by ByteDance against Tencent is related to the Act.

In its lawsuit, the company that owns TikTok considers Tencent's action to block access to content from Douyin, the Chinese version of the TikTok application, to have violated the Anti-Monopoly Law. Therefore, the company asked the court to force Tencent to stop this and pay compensation worth 90 million Chinese yuan or the equivalent of IDR 195.7 billion.

This is not the first conflict between these two tech giants. What's more, the respective founders who are now billionaires, Zhang Yiming from ByteDance and Pony Ma from Tencent, have previously exchanged arguments.

Last January alone, ByteDance publicly accused Tencent of blocking some of its products. Includes Douyin blocking as well as the Feishu job search app on WeChat. However, this is the first time the company has used the Antitrust Law as the legal basis for their claim.

"We (ByteDance) believe that competition is the best for consumers and increases innovation," said a spokesperson for ByteDance as quoted by Bloomberg, Friday, February 5.

Therefore, continued a spokesman for ByteDance, his party has filed a lawsuit to protect the rights of companies and users.

On the other hand, Tencent has denied all the accusations raised by ByteDance. When contacted by Bloomberg, Tencent insisted that it always prioritizes fair competition and open collaboration.

“ByteDance's allegations are false and dangerous. We have not received any material related to the lawsuit," explained Tencent to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, the court did not answer the calls and commentary requests when contacted by Bloomberg reporters.

Tencent and ByteDance are the two big companies on China's social media platforms. It is known, Tencent has more than 1.2 billion monthly users. Meanwhile, the QQ application that is also owned by Tencent is used by more than 700 monthly active users.

Indeed, ByteDance does not release monthly user numbers for the Douyin application. However, a source obtained by Detik states that this application has 600 million daily active users. This feud is the new chapter of the fierce competition that has been going on for several years between the two giants.