Hacker News Reader

Comment by peacefulhat | Hacker News Reader

Which companies? If you mean Google search, they decided it wasn't worth complying with Chinese laws and left. You may not agree with the specific laws but complying with local laws is a bare minimum requirement for entry into the market of every country. Google even made a second attempt to reenter China, but shut down due to criticism from employees and the US government.

View on HN

All Google services are banned, IIRC. And the legality of anticompetitive practice is hardly a justification. This executive order is, after all, entirely legal.

Like Airbnb? Uber? Many other smaller examples

Good examples. AirBnB operated fine in China even has a China BU last time I checked. Uber sold it's operation in China to local competitors as they were losing any way.

No AirBNB was/is getting CRUSHEd in china because the monopoly power of the companies already present. You have to understand that competition in China is like a childrens playground, with the CCP being the parents.

They will choose the winners and losers, but they will do so by balancing their own metrics, which has China's economic power as no.1 priority.

Only know is Airbnb doing more OK, after moving servers to china, making local joint ventures, changing their name to a chinese one etc. etc.

AirBnB would still get crushed like most other American companies when they face strong local competitors even if they have full support from CCP. These companies are usually terrible at localization and what works in America won't just work in China. Doesn't mean it's not possible for them to succeed, LinkedIn for example, did fairly well in China so far.

AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"

Neither of which are banned in China. It isn't allowed to offer cab services with a privately owned car in China, but this is also true in most of the EU.

When the laws are vague and broad and applied arbitrarily, they are basically the same as American laws like the IEEPA which give Trump the power to ban those companies. By the same argument, you may not agree with IEEPA but it exists and ByteDance and Tencent have to deal with it. It is not a good argument though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com