Remember the BRICs (a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China, all important emerging economies)? Or the PIIGS (the heavily indebted European nations of Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece and Spain)? How about those NINJA (no income, no job or assets) loans that wrought havoc on the US economy?

In recent years, at least in any discussion about the stockmarket, there have been fewer more prevalent finance industry acronyms than FAANG.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet (the parent of Google). This refers to the five US-based tech companies revolutionising their respective industries, whose share prices and market valuations have relentlessly marched higher over the past couple of years, and who have grown so dominant they are now in the crosshairs of legislators from Washington to Europe and here in Australia.

Yet for all the awestruck discussion of the FAANGs, there is another bad finance acronym that you might not have heard of that you should probably get to know (especially if dire predictions for the future of the FAANGs have any merit).

The BAT acronym refers to three of China (and the world's) biggest internet companies that are becoming increasingly prominent, and that share some uncanny parallels to their counterparts in the US.

The so-called BATs are: Baidu, which could loosely be described as China's version of Google; Alibaba, the country's answer to Amazon (although it is much more than that); and Tencent, the owner of messaging platform WeChat that could be compared to Facebook.

Depending upon the timeframe you use, the performance of the BATs on the stockmarket has been even more stunning than that of the FAANGs (Alibaba is listed in the US; Bidu and Tencent are listed in Hong Kong).

And just as Washington is increasingly casting its gaze over US tech giants - US congressional intelligence committees are investigating Facebook's interaction with Russia during last year's election, and President Donald Trump has threatened to break up Amazon - so too is Beijing taking a more active interest in China's internet giants.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that China wants to build significant equity stakes in Tencent and a division of Alibaba. The move could give the government board seats, and greater control over an increasingly powerful corner of the world's second-biggest economy which, compared to other sectors such as telecommunications, energy and banking, has been relatively free from direct government control, until now.

Last week, Bloomberg said China was engaged in the "biggest crackdown on freedom of expression and media in the internet era". The country's government recently fined Tencent and Baidu for broadcasting "negative" content that violated official rules, for example.

An open question is whether the situation inside China impedes the ability of the BATs to go global, something Chinese companies in general have not yet mastered.

Tencent, for example, has been making significant strategic investments outside the country. It paid $US8.6 billion to buy the Finnish maker of video game Clash of Clans in 2016, and recently built a 5 per cent stake in Elon Musk's auto and energy company Tesla. It's also an investor in Zoox, the self-driving car start-up founded by a Melbourne designer.

Baidu might well be the first company to get self-driving cars on the roads. For its part, Alibaba has made no secret of its global ambitions, and established an office in Australia last year. Many local merchants such as Bellamy's and Blackmores have benefited from access to the huge Chinese market via its platforms.

Alibaba also recently set aside $US15 billion for "moonshot" investments over the next three years - which in theory may unearth something fundamentally innovative used by the entire world.

The internet hasn't been around for very long, in the scheme of things. A lot has changed over the past 25 years, during which it went mainstream. Corporate empires have emerged from nowhere, and also disappeared.

With China's internet giants determined to succeed on the world stage, and sinking huge sums into innovation, the next couple of decades could be even more transformative.