Chapter 14 Chapter 6 The Corruption Crisis Encountered by Taobao

In recent years, the sixth mistake Jack Ma has made is the lax management of "Taobao Xiaoer". In July 2012, Yan Limin, the former general manager of Taobao Juhuasuan, was arrested by the public security organs. Six months later, the court sentenced him to 7 years in prison for accepting bribes. Taobao Juhuasuan was very brilliant in 2011. At that time, the business model of group buying was flourishing in China, so Alibaba launched Juhuasuan as a group buying platform, and soon occupied 50% of the national group buying market share.In 2011, the transaction volume of Juhuasuan reached 10.1 billion.However, when Juhuasuan’s transaction volume increased significantly, we also saw a lot of corrupt behavior among some Taobao managers—that is, "Taobao Xiaoer", also known as "Dian Xiaoer". And Yan Limin was the most important big mouse that was caught.

In April 2012, a domestic magazine "IT Times Weekly" once published a long report "Taobao Corruption Undercover Investigation". When he has the handle, for Ma Yun, anti-corruption will kill Taobao, and if he does not fight corruption, Ali will die.This sentence is very similar to what Chiang Kai-shek said in the movie when Chiang Ching-kuo was "fighting tigers" in Shanghai in 1948.It's actually a logic.It can also be seen from this that at this time, corruption within Taobao has become a very serious problem. According to the analysis of this report, there were mainly three kinds of corruption behaviors of the "Taobao Xiaoer" at that time:

The first is called brushing credit.When you go to a Taobao store to buy something, how do you know whether it is a good store or a bad one?How do consumers evaluate this store?Depends on its credit. Taobao.com has set up a credit system of more than 20 levels for these sellers. For example, if a store reaches 251 points (Taobao sellers can get 1 point for each "good review" from buyers, and no points for moderate reviews. "Bad review" (minus 1 point), you can get a "diamond"; when you get 10,001 points, you can get a blue "crown"; if you get 500,001 points, then Can get a golden "crown".

Therefore, the increase in the number of transactions and the credit of merchants have become the credit marks of Taobao, an Internet world. In this case, the first kind of third-party, gray business appeared: reputation brushing.Someone invented a diamond brushing software, which can help merchants increase the number of transactions and get good reviews, so as to increase credit points (there are also manual diamond brushing).At this time, people inside Taobao need to participate in this process.Many "Taobao Xiaoer" participated in this illegal behavior of brushing diamonds back then.

The second kind of gray business is called "deleting bad reviews".After buying something in an online store, many consumers will give a good or bad evaluation according to the quality of the product and service attitude.For online stores, "bad reviews" are very lethal and will directly affect sales.As a result, a profession called "bad reviewer" was formed, that is, someone specially posted those bad reviews, and asked the store to spend money to delete the bad reviews.It is said that 300 yuan can delete a bad review.Therefore, there are specialized agencies to hire people to do this work, so it has become a profession, forming a black industrial chain.

The third kind of gray business is even worse. Some "Taobao Xiaoer" have established some mouse companies, so-called public relations service companies, to collect money from Taobao merchants by providing special services.For example, if a merchant gives 100,000 or 15 yuan a year to the mouse company, the mouse company can guarantee that the merchant will appear in a prominent position on the Taobao and Juhuasuan pages to promote the merchant's products. Sweeping credit, deleting bad reviews, and forming a mouse company, these series of behaviors actually seriously interfered with the normal business information environment of Taobao, the largest C2C and B2C website in the country.Finally, between the spring and summer of 2012, a major commercial crisis of Taobao was formed.

There is a very serious problem here, that is, everyone believes that the Internet has played a revolutionary role in promoting the progress of China's commercial civilization and the entire civil society in the past 20 years.Under this premise, many people believe that Internet technology will naturally promote openness and transparency.But from the case of "Taobao Xiaoer", we will find that this is actually a serious false proposition. Although the Internet has changed the original old business order, it has also established a new business order of its own while overthrowing the old order. When the new order is established, people who own these technologies and these platforms naturally have The ability to build barriers.And when these barriers are established, if the system is not well established, it is very likely that a new monopoly will be formed, and a new autocracy may even be formed.

For example, people like me can express my opinions by writing books, writing columns, and giving speeches. In the Internet age, I can give speeches and express my views on various forums, WeChat, Weibo and other platforms.But when a new order is established, especially when many platforms and traffic are controlled by several large companies, a new monopoly may form.For example, the word "Wu Xiaobo" was suddenly blocked by search engines and platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, so no matter how much I said while standing on the road, people would not be able to find me, because As an individual, I have been eliminated in the Internet field, and I no longer exist.

Therefore, "Internet technology will naturally promote openness and transparency" is a false proposition, and we need to be vigilant against the formation of new monopolies. I shall continue this point with a quote from Hayek, who once said: "By endowing government with unlimited powers, the most arbitrary forms of government can be legitimized. And a democracy can be Establish the most complete despotism imaginable." Here, we can replace the "government" in Hayek's sentence with "many platforms". And this is what we must be very vigilant about in the Internet age.

Without a sound supervision mechanism, the more advanced technology is more likely to become a tool of corruption and monopoly.