Give Alibaba a second chance to purge fakes

Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, courted controversy last week for saying that many fake products are better than branded goods. His comment seemed to be part of his fightback after Alibaba was dropped from the anti-counterfeiting coalition and widely criticized for being a "platform" selling fakes.

Alibaba Group was suspended from the membership of Washington-based International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition in May, just one month after it became a member, because of accusations that it had failed to control the sale of fake goods on its online e-commerce platform, Taobao. Has Alibaba failed in its fight against fake goods, or have the IACC officials acted unfairly against the group?

Alibaba is the world's biggest e-commerce platform. Its customer-to-customer (C2C) model, represented by Taobao, and business-to-customer (B2C) model, Tmall, are its major business models. In 2014, Alibaba launched Tmall, through which global brands could directly sell their products to Chinese customers.