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Comment by johncolanduoni | Hacker News Reader

In the AWS case, the law that AWS was breaking was that they were operating telecom equipment while not being a Chinese company. So I think there’s more symmetry there (though one could argue that there’s at least a uniformly enforceable rule on all foreign companies, unlike the ByteDance case).

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Yes, the closest example would be Huawai in this case but the lack of uniformly enforced rules is deafening.

If US were to decide that all telecom equipment used in the US must be produced by domestic companies then that's fair enough.

Going after one specific privately owned company, influencing ally states' purchase decision, banning foreign companies globally from supplying chips is outright bullying and sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.

> ...sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.

Isn't that exactly what the Chinese laws do? Everything I've read seems to say that they prevent foreign companies from being able to fairly compete against local Chinese. companies.

No. The grandparent addresses exactly this point.

When Google entered the Chinese search market it was competing fairly with local players: both Baidu and Google have to accept the (authoritarian) rule that they need to censor their search if they want to legally operate in China.

You could argue if the rule itself is good (I think it's not), but the point is that there are clearly stated rules that Google could choose to comply with or not.

Which "rule" did TikTok, Huawai, Wechat violate other than the fact that they are born Chinese companies?

The US could also decide that all social networks that operate in the US must be owned by American companies and subject to congressional inquiries. That would be fair enough, though that's an even more extreme version than what the Chinese government has been demanding.

I think it's important to clear up why Google left China. Google was complying with Chinese rules. They left China because of a state-sponsored attack on Google[1]. Trying to play the high road with CCP, while leaving this out, is whitewashing American tech history in the state.

Given that the Chinese state elected to hack an American firm that was operating in it's borders, you could make any sort of excuse to prevent Chinese firms from owning American infrastructure for any sort of national security reasons. TikTok doesn't have to break any rules. If I see my roommate get mauled by a tiger, that doesn't mean I have to sit around and wait to get mauled before I take an action.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010%E2%80%932016...

FWIW AWS basically skirted this by having the chinese companies they contract with be the official "seller of record"/"operator"/"owner" but the regions are de-facto operated by western AWS engineering teams under a complicated contracting scheme.

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