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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure in 2019 if [Chinese company] offered to pay Google a bunch of money for cloud services, Google would take it. Unlike in China, large US corporations don't act as an extension of the government, so China being a rival superpower to the US wouldn't be terribly relevant. Not that the US in general avoids trading with China either.

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justicezyx isn't saying Google would turn down a Chinese company's business. justicezyx is saying a Chinese company cannot become popular among US consumers. I don't exactly agree with that argument, but we should at least understand what the argument is.

I gather that from their later replies. I imagine you can see why I interpreted the statement that way in the first place though.

> large US corporations don't act as an extension of the government

Have you read this? https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Yes, but we are discussing "compared to" scenario here.

I agree Chinese companies are basically branches of government if that's what you are saying however I also think the relationship between corporate USA and the federal government is a lot closer than most people realise.

"A lot closer than most people realise" != the same.

Huawei (a Chinese company) was paying Google a bunch of money in 2019 until they were banned by the government. You may argue that this was justified for national security reasons, but the decision was ultimately up to the whims of the president, and not subject to any sort of actual process or oversight by elected officials.

Trump, like it or not, is an elected official and I doubt he understands very much about tech to make that decision on his own.

What was Huawei paying Google for? If anything, Google was paying Huawei to be the default search engine on its phones outside of China.

What are you talking about?

I am saying TikTok has to base its engineering entirely in US soil, given its prospect to become main stream.

Tiktok is just a rebranded version of the app called 抖音 (Douyin). It's made in China

TikTok is already mainstream.

The US government and corporations are basically one and the same. The USG will extend deals that favor corporations. China is an "enemy" to the extent that it will harm the profitability and flexibility of US corporations or the military empire that supports US market dominance.

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.

> The US government and corporations are basically one and the same.

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'.

This is a mere tactical disagreement. The government and the security state are extensively intertwined to an extent that the place where one begins and the other ends is hard to distangle given the revolving door of employees and defense contracts.

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

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