TikTok Agreed to Buy More Than $800M in Cloud Services from Google
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All they have to do is say "Give us the data stored on GCP host" and TikTok is legally obligated to comply.
To be fair, it's not much different than in the United States unless the data belongs to a US citizen, which is why many companies are attempting to domicile cloud data in their own country.
Ironically enough, Google is one of the few major tech companies that can't be compelled to hand over information to China.
>To comply with the law, for instance, Apple announced that it would transfer the operation of iCloud in Mainland China to a government-sponsored data company named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law#Ef...
Interestingly enough, Google gets bashed most on HN than all the other companies in this list combined.
It lead to some truly fantastic moments with Zuck grandstanding while every other company was being bashed for bowing down to China last year. Truly bizarro world.
Apples efforts only look good compared to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but that's because they are so bad.
But the issue is that bytedance is still physically located in China, and is probably subject to CCP pressure. eg. "it'd be a real shame if your beijing offices were shut down because of fire code violations". Or they go straight to the CEO and demand that they backdoor their US servers or he gets sent to the gulag. According to wikipedia, the CEO of TikTok reports directly to the CEO of Zhang Yiming, so there isn't really separation in terms of control.
Which leaves us with the question as to whether or not the government cares what the law says or whether they would back down if employees in China said they can't easily hand over foreign data.
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So I really don't see what your point is here.
Which Chinese law?
US and China are both super power. Don’t be naive that they would be doing things differently.
I am saying TikTok has to base its engineering entirely in US soil, given its prospect to become main stream.
To think that a country half a world away would factor into calculations in any other way is a misunderstanding of great power politics. There is no military threat to anything a normal person would consider domestic interests.
Not really. Corporations and the government fight about all kinds of stuff, like encryption, and handing over private information about their users. Companies try to buy influence through lobbying, sure, but that's a far cry from 'basically one and the same'.
The extent to which the buisness community as a whole has the ear of the government vs the people is evident given the extremely large disagreements between public opinion polls and implemented policy. If corporations want something, they don't always get it, but if the people want something and corps disagree the people almost never get it.
Study:
Gilens and Page. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". American Political Science Association. 2014. pgs. 564-581.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
BBC Article about it: "Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy" https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
Have you read this? https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
I posted about this a lot in the last couple of days. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613 and the subthread underneath it (which you'll have to uncollapse). You can find other explanations at:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
The evidence is extremely clear, by the way. If we'd found any undue influence, we'd say so, but the private data confirms what's already clear from the public record (if you look at other users' commenting histories): people just disagree. The voting patterns don't show anything that the commenting patterns don't.
For a foreign company to operate in China it needs to be majority Chinese owned.
It can be argued that if foreign companies are not allowed to profit in China, then they shouldn't be able to do so abroad.
Of course being the manufacturing capital of the world, they have a lot of leverage.
I have no qualms doing business with American, Canadian, Indian, Japanese, or European (minus Hungary) companies...
I would be very cautious doing business with Chinese, Russian, or Saudi firms.
Even after this disclosure of the TikTok $800M Agreement - SnapChat is still a much larger customer in spend per year.
https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spen...
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-vide...
That’s like 1.5B MAU, which is even more ridiculous. But let’s look.. 7 billion people, 4.5B have internet access. So more than over 15% of humans with internet access are using tiktok every day.
3.5B humans have a smart phone, so 1 in 3 are on tiktok every day? Nah.
And honestly, I’m fairly even on china but I don’t really believe numbers the put out for most things.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...
https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...
Then you only need a relatively small percentage of the rest of the world to reach that number.
Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it is not real.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The hype is believable.
[0]: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-27/everything-fake-ex...
>No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics
How hard is it to generate a uuid on first startup and use that to track logged out app users? Or are they being willfully blind just so they can inflate their metrics?
One of my major frustrations with algorithmic content curation is that you can fall into a rut where the algorithm just shows you similar content to what you've liked in the past. TikTok on the other hand is constantly showing me fresh and unexpected content, so that my For You Page never feels stale. For example, I've recently stumbled into "International Logistics TikTok", where I get recommended videos posted by crew on cargo ships, talking about their favorite ports and canals, and showing tours of their cabins on the ship. I never would have sought out these videos on purpose, but TikTok's algorithm is good enough that it figured out that I enjoyed them, and that's a level of curation I haven't seen on any other social media platform before.
> While a video is likely to receive more views if posted by an account that has more followers, by virtue of that account having built up a larger follower base, neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors in the recommendation system.
This seems to ring true to my experience, and seems to be very different than other platforms e.g. Youtube. I've seen a lot of videos on TikTok get very popular that never would have taken off on any other platform
This sounds a lot like random :)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-cloud-hits-a-10b-annual...
TikTok being referenceable means a lot more so sales people can go out and tell CxOs “look we are a safe choice because $x company trusts us”.
Disclaimer: Just in case I get called out. I work for AWS consulting but I am so far removed from the sales process it’s not even relevant. All opinions are my own. I’ve been in the room more when “enterprise deals” were being made in smaller B2B companies.
Note that "Cloud" includes both GCP and G Suite - my guess is that G Suite is a very large portion of that total, so GCP alone is much smaller.
https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/29/microsoft-earnings-q2-202...
More generally/seriously how exactly does this conversation go? I've seen deals at my company which have been in the 7 figure range (involving many, many people) but never anything so large. Is this the kind of thing discussed only at C* level?
The biggest thing I wonder when these sorts of "probably C* level" deals is how often they get negotiated for political and/or marketing reasons, and then are just handed down to staff to figure out how to make them work. I've definitely seen major shifts in third party products selected long before anyone on the tech side gets involved to find out what the implementation is going to look like. Sometimes by the time you get IT involved, it's too late and way too high level to put the brakes on something if it isn't as ideal as promised.
Of course, the company’s idea of “moving to the cloud” was a “lift and shift” and still having to go through the same procurement process as if we were on prem just to get some EC2 instances provisioned and not taking advantage of any AWS services.
I didn’t realize how dumb that was until it was too late. By the time I learned anything about AWS, the infrastructure gatekeepers had taken over.
There’s a cap to the payout a sales rep can get.
Others have mentioned whole 50 person deal teams from both sides, multi year processes, all of Google’s most senior execs pressing the flesh etc.
But to your question this type of deal usually goes beyond even the C Suite, to a companies board and shareholders. The bank I was involved with held an ‘Extraordinary General Meeting’ for reps of major shareholders, to present its case and get sign-off. This part of the process was actually the longest, it took ~6 months.
That was because the shareholders of the bank had interests to be accommodated, for instance one of them was also a major holder of Amazon stock so they had a vested interest in having the bank choose AWS. They needed to be worked around or convinced choosing GCP would create more value for them than portfolio synergies.
Thank you for highlighting this. It is a reminder to engineers that sometimes the best technical solution doesn't win because there are usually many factors at play.
Did they state that explicitly? Is this legal?
Seems equivalent to asking management to directly transfer money to the pocket of only some of the shareholders stiffing out all others, which I'm pretty sure is generally illegal.
It really does solidify a kind of class structure within these tech giants. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon at the top and everyone else, even massive players like snap and tick tock are completely reliant upon them.
* and going one step further, all of these rely on a handful of janitorial companies to operate. so maybe the ABMs of the world are in the top class?
We'll have three platforms that control most non-Chinese computing. It's hard for smaller players to compete with that kind of inertia.
It’s certainly hard to compete at running a public cloud, but it’s hard to compete in any industry that requires $X00B capex to get the ball rolling.
If US banned TikTok, willn't that decision affect TikTok? (like it affected Huawei)
I highly doubt it will ever materialize.
I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils.
I see your argument a lot and its quite stupid.
As far as never attacked anyone. Of course they have. China is part of that US allies group fighting terrorism in your families homeland. Here is a list for you of all of the conflicts:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_P...
As for your link, most of it is about peace keeping missions. The others involve countries that share a border with China. As I said, China has for the most part never attacked countries it didn't share borders with and I don't live in any of these. Even then, they haven't done carpet bombing, used chemical or nuclear weapons against these countries unlike the US.
https://www.indiatvnews.com/fyi/india-china-border-dispute-w...
Looking some of them up seperatly, the article seems correct.
Stating border conflicts with 18 countries
Most (probably all) countries in South and East Asia have multiple border disputes. Japan has disputes with China, Russia and South Korea. India has disputes with Pakistan, China and Nepal, and used to have disputes with Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. See a trend? Every major country in the region has or has had disputes with every neighboring country.
On a much smaller scale, we're still running Guantanamo.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US has not always been the preeminent ally of Israel since its founding. A lot of people seem to just have this vague sense that it's always been the situation. It's something that happened relatively recently.
For example, if USA found out something about me that they don't like, they might prevent me from visiting USA in the future (which is something I might want to do), or they might force U.S. companies (e.g. PayPal, Google) to close my online accounts. And they might do those things unilaterally as I'm not a U.S. citizen.
On the other hand, I wouldn't care much if China banned me from visiting or from business with their companies.
There are many things countries and people do which they will not accept having done to them in turn.
It doesn't matter what the US did in Europe here does it?
Allowing China to spy should be stopped regardless.
The CCP has leverage on any Chinese national who still has family in China.
They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.).
I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.
The billions of dollars that the Chinese Government will invest in order to compensate for the sanctions might have the unintended side effects of actually making performance of Huawei gear more efficient. The jump from FPGA to ASIC is pretty big as far as efficiency, and being able to have it financed for free to defend against US sanctions is pretty sweet.
They also happen to have stockpiled enough FPGAs to buy time for the transition.
Building a competitive ASIC will also be significantly more challenging now that Huawei has been cut off from all the major EDA companies.
Finally, I assume that Xilinx is well into development on future product lines based on newer processes. It would be extremely difficult for Huawei to bootstrap their way to commercially competitive FPGAs.
Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it
At most they could bar employees of the federal government (and its contractors) from using it, which given the federal government is one of the largest would have a large impact. Even that limited action however would be met with a large legal challenge and would have a good chance of failure for anything that is not a Government Computer / Phone / Network
"National Security"
Now if Biden was elected I am sure it would be different
[Citation needed]
On the contrary, the US constitution specifically permits regulation of international trade as an enumerated power. All the US government needs to do is put ByteDance on the same entity list they put ZTE and Huawei on and Apple and Google would have no choice but to pull TikTok from their app stores.
This will bypass the constitution every time. It’s how the president takes a dump on the constitution.
Yea I know they big and there is a lot I don't graps/knows about their system
We took the deal and it's worked out well in both price and performance.
I'm fine paying for content, but the content rarely belongs on HN, because it is insane to say to the general HN reader "Hey, here's an interesting article. Pay to read it before you have any idea of what it is about beyond the title".
What happens when you have pay-to-read content on HN is that no one actually discusses the content of the article, and only discusses general topics relating to the topic of the article - making for lower quality discussions.
If you want a good discussion for a topic you like, go pay for access to it. Nowhere in HN rules does it say that content cannot be behind paywalls.
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls ---> that have workarounds. <---
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
I don't want to be mean but literally every sentence in your post is off base or just wrong in some manner.
I think it's worth noting that The Information is an incredible journalism outfit that does incredible work. I subscribe not for access to the content (which other sites reblog within hours), but to support legit journalists doing real, original research.