Trump administration gives TikTok 45 days to sell to Microsoft or leave US

The EU is already starting to formulate its own version of internet sovereignty, the recent invalidation of Privacy Shield by the EU is giving an indication of what's to come, as were the threats by the US over the taxation of internet giants in Europe. It's not as loud as the China-US conflict but it's going to happen.

I think it's also important that this chilling effect doesn't need to be overt. If the US is willing to emulate China's tactics in reaction to China, there is no guarantee whatsoever, that it will not leverage it against other countries. On trade this was already stated at several points during this administration, directly targeting Europe, Korea, and so on.

This is why the US in the past has generally avoided taking overtly partisan stances on the international stage. As soon as the US moves from being the maintainer of global order to national player, everyone will start to make calculations if the US can still be relied upon. For that reason this is a huge win for China in my opinion.

By engaging China in a tit-for-tat manner the US makes itself a huge deal smaller than it needs to be.

This makes him look tough -- standing up to China! -- and able to sell that to the rube demographic.

I don't really think that's what's going on here though.

That's a weird message to send to the company itself but I guess it's about as logical as anything else we do. Shaking down the wrong person seems par for the course at this point.

TikTok had some of the rad and most creative memes that splendidly ridiculed the failures of the current government (and their principles, policies [demonetization, GST, bank busts, GDP/growth/economy crash, election theater, ultra-right-religious-discourse, absolute capitulation of mainstream media and their subservience to ruling members, lies around border conflicts, failure of central and federal systems, failure of judiciary, handling of the pandemic, the whole "light lamps and bang plates to ward off virus" etc - everything!) and also their associated right wing organizations). The ban was dressed up as "ban on Chinese products". Meanwhile, the BCCI (a sports body - whose budgets rival GDP of few nations), which is now having the son of India's Home Minister as one of the top shots in management, continues their deal with a Chinese sponsor.

Now, some local app with a lot of "censoring" is what's being touted as India's answer, while it has always been control and power to shape and keep public opinion under check -as defined by Ministry of Truth here.

Many birds with one shot!

Summary: "We see you have a good business here, funny if something might happen to it! You know, bad things happen around these days a lot! But we can help, ya'see!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Shah

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/retai...

China bad, Uighurs, TikTok, trade deals ... Coronavirus.

Trump: I’m not bad, China is. Look at all that stuff in that bucket, need to do something about it, maybe I will, maybe I’m the only one that will.

Standard manipulation really.

Edit: I’ll add that this tactic is so effective that Biden had no choice but to parrot the rhetoric in the dem debates (said some pretty hard line stuff). Biden/Obama have had a legitimate hard line stance against China with their Asia pivot strategy, but they never used the hard-line rhetoric politically until Trump did.

Bill Clinton has similar instincts to Trump. When he campaigned for Hilary in red states, he would straight up say things along the lines of ‘I never thought Obamacare was a good idea’.

Trump is in full gear rallying the base, and he’s going to force Biden to mirror some of these views. If he does this successfully, Biden’s attacks on the pandemic handling will constantly be convoluted with the larger China-bad narrative.

One life to live. Time is always ticking.

And we all have individual levels of risk that we're willing to assume. Even when confronted with the same data.