Tan Yifan

    cicitan2011@gmail.com

    WE often take brave claims such as “we will serve all Internet users” or “we will take over the whole Internet market” from a startup company as jokes that sound like hubris. But for current IT giants such as Jack Ma and Robin Li, they have partially achieved their goals — conquering the Chinese Internet market.

    In a little more than a decade, the conquerors-turned-monopolists have become the idols or the “godfathers” of many Chinese digital natives. Their words have been quoted in classes and the products they make are daily necessities.

    If it were not for recent criticisms against Baidu, China’s top search engine operator founded by Li, Chinese netizens would still be enchanted by the knowledge and convenience brought by it.

    Some believe that it is high time to reveal the evil side of Baidu, which has sold its click-through rate (CTR) and search ranks at a high price and capitalized on its forums, especially disease-themed forums, allowing quacks and advertisements from unlicensed hospitals to mislead forum visitors.

    Netizens should realize that the origin of such evilness comes from monopolies.

    As the biggest Chinese search engine, Baidu today has no competitor in Chinese — Google withdrew from the Chinese mainland several years ago; Bing.com and Sogou.com couldn’t provide the fullest list for searchers.

    In addition to its search services, Baidu has made many by-products, such as an encyclopedia, archives, maps and forums. All these have made it omnipresent for Chinese Internet users. No one has noticed that the top two to three links it provides are commercial information and the goods or hospitals it “recommends” are those that have paid a high price.

    Whether Chinese users are informed of Baidu’s commercial methods or not, they have become highly dependent on the only major search engine that is available to them.

    Although the recent criticisms are the strongest force in recent years urging the company to make a change, the words against it won’t stop millions of ignorant Chinese from using it in their daily life — negatively absorbing twisted values and false knowledge and using it to attack experts and doctors.

    Sadly, Baidu is not the only evil Internet service provider out there and it will not be the last. It is a trend on the Chinese Internet today to fool and mislead young users.

    Twitter-like Weibo allows PR companies to lead public opinions; e-commerce giants such as Taobao and Vip.com are awash with counterfeit and shoddy goods.

    What Internet users can do is quite limited because they only have one big search engine, one Twitter-like service, one big e-commerce platform and one instant messaging provider.

    As Internet monopolists develop, gradually the rights of individuals will be eroded and all we can do is to wait for the monopolies themselves to make changes or hope a merciful, morally correct IT leader emerges.

    Some netizens commented on the Baidu scandal, saying that luckily Baidu doesn’t own the news outlets or else people would never have found out about how Baidu conducts business.

    Compared with Baidu, Alibaba is one of Sina Weibo’s biggest shareholders and has just bought the South China Morning Post. Will it then become difficult to attack Alibaba?

    Monopolists are obscurants. With the help of the Internet, they can easily delete or rewrite a fact, and digital natives are the most vulnerable groups of such a dictatorship.

    So how can we still tolerate Internet monopolists?

    (The author is a Shenzhen Daily editor.)