Pavel Durov on the TikTok Sale to U.S. company

By prohibiting Chinese companies from operating on US soil, Americans aren't renouncing their values or losing the moral high ground as long as companies from other free countries are allowed to operate. The actions of the US admin are long overdue and Europe must muster up the courage (and incur the costs) of taking a similar position now.

Saying if some countries aren't allowed to freely trade on American soil then none should is a non-sequitur.

Well no. For many years now, the internet is no longer a truly global network, considering at least how China has been treating foreign-owned properties (Great Firewall).

If you wanted to make a point in favor of a global internet, I guess you could suggest that the US should take the high road and reap the benefits of openness and competition, rather than get down to mudslinging Chinese foreign investors. Not that we should preserve something that in reality has been gone for over a decade now.

Russia's Yandex, Mail.ru, and VKontakte have been banned in Ukraine since 2017 for the same reason[1]:

> Russia also continues to hack into individual cellphones, with Ukrainian Colonel Ivan Pavlenko saying that the Russians had gotten into his phone at least twice in 2018. He also confirmed that Russia has used its ability to tap into cellular networks to send SMS text messages to Ukranian troops.

> These are tactics that the Kremlin has also reportedly used against NATO countries, including the United States, and allows Russia's intelligence services to both scrape potentially useful personal information and possibly insert disinformation onto these devices. The texts can also be psychological warfare tools, with past reports that some were purely insulting or threatening. Using hacked personal information, those threats could include very distressing ones directed at family members or significant others.

I believe, that the Internet of the 2020s cannot be compared to the Internet of the 1980s. It has become a business platform, and any country has the right to ban a foreign company from operating in its territory.

Especially so, if that company is based in a foreign state that is not considered trustworthy. And trust is based on mutually shared values: which the US and China have almost none.

At least to the Communist Party of China this has been clear for decades.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30741/ukrainian-office...

https://ig.ft.com/sites/uber-in-china/

2. Microsoft and the NSA have had a very cozy relationship for a long time

3. Microsoft is bidding to buy TikTok's US operations.

Yeah, I must be crazy to think something SIGINT-wise is afoot.

[1]Didn't the LinkedIn app also get busted for reading the content of the clipboard on iOS?

He is 200% right: this isn't an isolated event, it is the end of an era.

There was a time, starting in the Clinton administration when conservatives and liberals all over the world wanted open borders markets (with lots of trade agreements and China entering the WTO), democracy (in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia), migrants and open internet across borders.

Then, little by little people soured on all of that openness and globalization. Now many of the places that sought democracy are returning to authoritarian rulers (e.g: Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Brazil, China). Protectionism and closed borders are on the rise (Trump's wall, tariffs and withdraw from Trans Pacific Partnership, Brexit, EU crackdown on immigrants and staled new trade deals).

Tech will be the next victim. All over the world governments will begin restricting foreign companies, for economic, ethical, military or authoritarian reasons. China, Russia, Turkey and Iran always did it. Now the EU is getting sour on Google, Apple and Amazon. Trump is in full war against Huawei and now takes on TikTok.

Businesses will need to find ways to navigate these hostilities. Those that aren't cautious will pay an heavy price.

How do businesses handle that? I see two ways. Microsoft and IBM are two veterans on navigating regulations. Their secret has been a careful mix of compliance and heavy and expensive lobbying. Google seems to be learning this lesson. It seems to work. Huawei will need to learn it with them.

Another way would be to make tech that is immune to regulation either by design (Bitcoin, Signal) or by it's scale and how deeply is supported by local communities (WhatsApp). I don't believe this is effective in the long run. China, Russia and Turkey have shown that they can simply block these technologies when they become a nuisance.

But yeah, the situation is sad to say at least. I wholly understand US blocking Chinese social media company to reciprocate how China (and others) have done in their markets. Yet the current US administration has not necessarily framed it in such light, rather just claimed ambiguous spying claims which are a bit of blanket statement.

Is it actually the case here or is it just a distraction or a negotiation tactic, hard to say. Certainly democratic countries should not stand idle when authoritarian governments attempt to extend their influence and spying capabilities especially within their own borders, even when it happens indirectly through companies. Sometimes playing nice and keeping status quo won't get you anywhere. But in this case the play seems rather dirty coming from a nation as devout of a believer in the free trade as US.

I guess at the core of this whole matter, is the imbalance in how the profits from internet, possibly the greatest invention since electricity and combustion engine, are distributed to the world. The way it's happening now shares some similarities to the imperialism age, where there were those who only produced goods (now consumers of internet services) to the richer countries without getting much in return. Similarly Google and Facebook might control the whole search and social media market in a country with local competitors having no chance of competing, without paying any taxes on the profits or contributing employment.

So by not wanting to become just another colony of the foreign technology companies, I guess authoritarian government can exploit that to legitimize their banning of Google and Facebook to help establish their own. But which in reality serves a bigger purpose as part of their security apparatus to spy and censorship their own people.

Of course I'm now completely omitting the angle that Google and Facebook could also be considered as part of US's spying apparatus, but I'll assume some good will here.

I don't understand the relation from ^ with the rest of his take.

He is saying the US should ban Tik Tok instead of forcing a sale of the US operation to a US company?

Not only is that ridiculous on its face because it's the government that's forcing the sale in the first place, it's also a fairly shady real estate practise, so we know where he got the idea. Imagine thinking ten years ago that the US government would force a private company to sell all their assets and then pay the government for that 'privilege'.

I am absolutely supportive of all actions taken to promote US companies, particularly against countries (including China) who have taken repeated drastic steps to promote home grown companies.

I have issues on how it is being handled by President Trump.

It's like the run up to the Iraq war all over again.

Seriously, people, you can't justify something by pointing out how other people have also done something wrong. You can't justify something by positing a principle that never existed before.

This whole story sounds like out of some dystopian bizarro fiction novel. So lip syncing teen girls are a national security risk now? What are you going to do when something real happens then?