Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Oct. 16 (Xinhua)-- Tianjin Binhai New area people's Court recently concluded a case of unfair competition in the "youth model" by buying members.

The plaintiff, "Tencent Video" and "Tencent NOW Live" jointly operated by Shenzhen Tencent computer Systems Co., Ltd., Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., and Tencent Digital (Tianjin) Co., Ltd., set up "Youth Mode" in App, and there will be a pop-up window when you open the home page. According to the App service agreement, users shall not interfere with or disrupt the normal operation of the software involved, add, delete or change the function or running effect of the software, and shall not carry out any acts harmful to minors.

The defendant, an App operated by a company in Beijing, used "advertisement blocking to automatically skip startup page ads" as a selling point to attract users to install, and then forced users to turn on "barrier-free access" to their software, so that they could directly read the content on the user's mobile phone screen and control the screen, learn about the user's behavior and perform the operation automatically.

The App takes the automatic closing function of the pop-up box of "Youth Mode" as one of the "member privileges", and uses "time-limited free" as a gimmick to guide users to choose to turn on the function. Once turned on, when users open network audio and video software such as "Tencent Video" and "Tencent NOW Live", the App will automatically skip or block the entrance pop-up window of "Youth Mode". Makes it impossible for users to use "teenage mode" through the home page prompt.

The court held that the accused not only violated the relevant laws and regulations on the protection of minors and the guidance of relevant regulatory departments, but also harmed the competitive interests of other operators and the legitimate rights and interests of consumers. Its function of skipping and blocking the entrance pop-up window of "youth mode" covers a variety of third-party applications in the field of network audio and video, resulting in the failure of the functional design of protecting minors. It destroys the market order and industry ecology of fair competition, and constitutes unfair competition. Considering that the plaintiff's product is well-known and has a great influence on the youth group, its "youth model" is a beneficial attempt to practice the minor civil air defense addiction system, and the alleged behavior has seriously affected the legitimate rights and interests of the plaintiff's company and consumers; and the defendant's behavior has an obvious commercial purpose, the App has been put on the shelves in many application markets, with many downloads, long duration, large user groups and large subjective fault. The shielding mode of the App is applicable to a wide range of factors, such as the impact on social and public interests. The court ordered the defendant to compensate the plaintiff for the economic loss of 3 million yuan. After the verdict in the case was pronounced, neither the original nor the defendant appealed, and a pre-execution settlement was reached, which has now been fulfilled.

The judge said that unfair competition that blocks the "youth model" should be severely cracked down on to create a clean Internet environment for minors. At the same time, parents should also guard against this kind of illegal App to make the "adolescent model" fail, strengthen the education and guidance of minors, and strengthen their own cognition.

CTOnews.com noted that the report on the use of the Internet by minors in China (2022) shows that the Internet access rate of minors has reached 99.9% in the past six months, and the proportion of using short video software is more than 60%.

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