Imagine you run a small batik shop in Bandung. You list your products on Tokopedia, Indonesia’s biggest online marketplace, the one everybody used. Then in December 2023 TikTok paid $840 million for 75.01% of it. The store you sell on is now controlled by a social media app. That is not a side story. That is your whole business, and you probably never got a vote.

Here is what actually happened. Indonesia banned TikTok Shop in 2023 for breaking rules on social commerce, which is the practice of selling stuff directly inside a scrolling feed. TikTok did not fight the ban. It went around it. It spent $1.5 billion on GoTo Group, took control of Tokopedia, and merged TikTok Shop into it. By January 2024 the two were one company, and TikTok held the controlling stake. The app got a legal front door back into a market of 270 million people.

Now think about the merchant. TikTok decides which videos get pushed to millions of feeds. TikTok also owns the store those videos link to. So TikTok can quietly favor sellers who pay for its ads, or favor its own house brands, and steer traffic wherever it wants. Indonesia’s antitrust agency, the KPPU, said exactly this in May 2025. It found the deal carries a “risk of monopoly” because a dominant social platform now controls a leading marketplace. That is not a shopkeeper being paranoid. That is the regulator agreeing.

The counterargument is real: for a small seller, one platform that combines discovery and checkout is convenient. You film a video, someone buys, done. No arguing with that. But convenience built on a single owner is a trap. When one company controls both the crowd and the cash register, it sets the fees, and you have nowhere to run.

The lesson travels. Whenever a platform buys the store you sell in, you become a tenant, not a partner. Indonesia is the test case. Watch what the KPPU forces TikTok to do, because your marketplace could be next.