San Francisco, CA- Although all of China’s significant search engine companies convened this past Thursday and signed an agreement that went towards self-regulation, many analysts state that will not stop ongoing battles between two major companies, Qihoo 360 Technology Co. and Baidu Inc (3-B battles).
On Thursday, twelve search engine players — including Qihoo 360, Baidu, and Tecent’s search engine soso.com — attended a signing ceremony. Additionally, the Internet Society of China (ISC) stated on its website that officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) also attended. However, when contacted by the Global Times, an official from the MIIT refused to comment on the agreement.
Each party agreed to use an industry convention, the robots.txt protocol, to tell cooperating search engines what information they can take from other websites.
Among other functions, this industry protocol is designed to protect sensitive information from search engine data mining. For example, on October 9, the blogger Fang Zhouzi used his Sohu
Weibo account and accused Qihoo’s search engine of illegally searching through users‘ personal data. As a result, MIIT has been investigating Zhouzi’s accusation. An ISC staff member who declined to be named told the Global Times stated that since this past August, the ISC has been acting mediator with major domestic search engine players. Their goal is to put an end to the 3-B battles and restore the country’s browser market. An agreement came after Baidu filed a lawsuit on October 16 against Qihoo 360 for improper practices. This included illegally mining through Baidu’s data and violating the robots.txt protocol.
However, this past Thursday, Qihoo 360 told the Global Times that they have obeyed all industry protocols. As they claimed, it is Baidu that is aiming to block Qihoo 360’s access to the domestic browser market with a discriminatory protocol: „We hope that this agreement will help forge a fair robots.txt protocol mechanism, instead of a competition tool for Baidu, the domestic search engine giant.”
Qihoo 360, a top Chinese anti-virus software firm, launched its search engine hao.360.cn this past August. According to the company, Qihoo ranks second in market shares after Baidu within one week of operation. This announcement by Qihoo roused concerns among the domestic browsers. On September 2, Wang Xiaochuan, the CEO of the search engine sogou.com, stated on its Sina Weibo account: „Qihoo 360 is now both a player and a referee.” When contacted by the Global Times this past Thursday, Baidu refused to comment on the agreement. Neither Sogou.com and soso.com could be reached by the press.
Despite the self-regulatory agreement, industry experts claim that the 3-B battles will go on. You Tianyu, an analyst at Beijing-based Internet consultancy iResearch, told the Global Times, „The government’s interference might weaken the battle between Qihoo 360 and Baidu, but it won’t eliminate the competition, which may be carried out more secretly in the future.” Zhang Zhifeng, an independent intellectual property lawyer, also stated, „Such an industry agreement is not legally binding. It’s more like a consensus obeyed voluntarily, and it’s hard to define liability for the parties.” Zhang further explained that since a party caught breaking the agreement would be condemned only via public opinion, industry regulations are necessary to protect users‘ online search rights.
Zhang also noted that the lack of such regulations means Chinese Internet users have no legal recourse when harmed by the 3-B battles: “[M]ost [users] are unaware that their personal data have been mined and made public.”
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