Sandberg: FB Shouldn't be Broken Up, or else Chinese Companies will Dominate | Hacker News Reader

Sandberg: FB Shouldn't be Broken Up, or else Chinese Companies will Dominate

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3 pointskouh8 comments

I think the "to compete with China" legal/moral waiver is an interesting recurring argument across industries and government

Is it wrong thou? I don't see the Chinese Government breaking up Alibaba or Tencent.

This leads to a slippery slope to the bottom though. The reason U.S. businesses are more successful in the international market is trust in our legal and financial systems. Eroding and curtailing these protections will just make the U.S. market another China. This is why people will spend over twice as much for an iPhone than a Huawei smartphone. This is why foreign tech companies and workers come to the U.S. and instead of China. Without that trust, we're left just competing on price and China can always do it cheaper.

The reason why U.S. business is more successful is that we have been pushing internationally for longer. As Chinese businesses expand internationally (typo: internally) they are out competing US companies on price and services. Once it has market share, it will raise prices.

> Chinese businesses expand internally

But they can only do that for so long. Companies like Alibaba rely on a captive domestic consumer market and corrupt political ties to China's regime. Again this is why the U.S. doesn't have to compete on price. Alibaba offers cloud services now similar to Amazon AWS and Google. If you were a startup in the U.S. would you use Alibaba if it was cheaper? Are you going to send all your proprietary source code and intellectual property to a server in China? And if everything does get stolen what would you do? File suit in a Chinese court? I'm sure the Chinese authorities would get right on that assuming your lawyer doesn't turn up missing.

I meant that as internationally.

Alibaba and Tencent is having major growth in the Asia markets faster than North American companies. You have to ask why that is, and the answer is that they're more willing to help the country their moving to. Look at the backlash that Amazon and Google is seeing from their employees when they try to sell surveillance to the government. Having worked at Tencent, I assure you that no one will object when they sell WeChat and WeChat tracking to Malaysia or Indonesia or Saudi Arabia.

That's exactly the crucial question I don't see being asked anywhere. It's answer has huge implications, it's non answer leads to a schizophrenic nation.

Can you elaborate on the implications? I think I know what you mean by "schizophrenic nation", but maybe clarify that too? It all sounds very interesting.

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