China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has held a meeting with tech companies including Alibaba and Tencent to tell them to stop blocking each other's website links from their platforms, Chinese newspaper The 21st Century Business Herald reported on Saturday.

The ministry on Friday proposed standards for instant messaging services to the companies, telling them all platforms must be unblocked within a timeline, according to the newspaper citing sources.

Companies at the meeting on Friday included Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu, Huawei and Xiaomi.

China's internet is dominated by a handful of technology giants who have historically blocked links and services by rivals on their platforms, creating what analysts have described as "walled gardens."

It is an increasingly prominent problem after the internet economy has shifted from personal computers to mobile phones, said Liu Xu, a research fellow at the National Strategy Institute of Tsinghua University.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tencent's WeChat and Ant Group's Alipay became the most commonly used health code scanning terminals, indicating users' dependence on WeChat and Alipay, Liu said.

"However, Tencent and Alibaba, along with Alibaba's affiliate Ant Group have formed two ecosystems that cannot be interconnected, which is not good for users. Meanwhile, it also forces other internet companies to take sides from the two," said Liu.

Liu said an example for the problem caused by the mutual block was that the health code of Alibaba's DingTalk could not be shared on the WeChat platform in March last year, which caused the DingTalk users to encounter difficulties in resuming work across provinces.

In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Alibaba and Tencent were gradually considering opening up their services to each other, such as by introducing Tencent's WeChat Pay to Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall e-commerce marketplaces.

(With input from Reuters)