Legal boundaries must be drawn for online commercial activities

SOME ONLINE LIVESTREAMING HOSTS promote products such as candies, chilli sauce and "medicines" bearing their names to their fans. But these products carry none of the required information about their ingredients, producers and production date that the law stipulates must be printed on the packages of food and medicines. Chinese Business View comments:

Livestreaming sales have become a lucrative way of transforming the popularity of livestreaming hosts into commercial profits.

Although the hosts claim to consume the products themselves, their endorsements cannot replace the quality check procedures and industrial inspection processes for food and pharmaceutical products.

It is not difficult to expose their lies, since the hosts are so busy in giggling and flirting before the cameras all day long, they don't have the time to produce large amounts of these supposedly homemade products to meet the demand of their fans. In fact, the "homemade" goods the hosts promote are usually made in small workshops.

The central authorities have vowed zero tolerance to food and drug safety issues, as they directly concern people's health and well-being. The industrial and commercial administrative authorities have no reason to ignore the dead zones of monitoring what is sold through livestreaming sites.

The internet is a multifunctional platform, where different industries overlap with each other, and thus it poses fresh challenges to the industrial and commercial administrative and supervisory departments.

No matter how fast the information technology develops, protecting public health from shoddy foods and drugs should always be the bottom line for both businesses and market supervisors.

The relevant laws and rules should be revised at the earliest date to draw boundaries for online commercial activities.