Company quarrel delivers message that monopolies distort the market

ON THURSDAY, SF EXPRESS, the leading domestic delivery company, and Cainiao Network Technology, a company financially backed by Alibaba that provides technological support to delivery companies, shut down their data sharing. As a result, a large number of deliveries were affected. With the intervention of the State Post Bureau, the two resumed their data sharing on Saturday. ThePaper.cn comments:

Both Cainiao and SF Express blamed each other for the shutting down of their data sharing and it is hard to know which was responsible for the quarrel. But one thing is certain: It is Cainiao that first raised the request to SF Express about providing more comprehensive logistics data, ostensibly to detect counterfeit goods. Cainiao also asked the delivery company to transfer the data from the Tencent Cloud storage it currently uses to Alibaba Cloud storage.

Such requests are unreasonable because they are a kind of extortion. SF has the right to choose its own data storage as well as which part of the delivery data it chooses to share. By raising these requests, Cainiao hopes to build a closed service platform from which it can exclude all competitors.