Hacker News Reader

Comment by elheffe80 | Hacker News Reader

No one thinks this has to do with the relationship between the US President and Oracle? Amazon is throwing a fit because they weren’t chosen to be the Pentagons cloud provider. Now this. It’s favoritism.

View on HN

At leas the pentagon deal was government related. Why the hell is the government putting it's nose up private deals like this and also asking for a cut?

I think your answer is right there at the end. They want a cut.

The federal budget is hundreds of tiktoks. and where would the money even go?

I love the cynicism of believing that the presidency is interfering in the deals, but the optimism of believing that it must then go towards Federal budgets and not certain people's pockets. :)

It’s not cynicism that he’s interfering when it’s obvious - literally Trump making statements on his Twitter. As for the money into his pocket; no need, the reasoning for Trump is that it makes his voters like him (since they dislike China), which gets him reelected.

Trump wants the cut , he is not asking for one to actually fund the federal budget.

He wants one to score with the voters. Given the unusual nature of the ask , it could be a donation to the project of his choicing like the wall

because the government is run like a shady real estate company from the 80s, the president's term for the cut was quite literally, 'key money'

Because in this case the executive branch effectively forced the sale to happen by threatening to ban the platform. TikTok on its own wasn't looking to sell. Now, they have to sell to an American company in order to make Trump happy. So what else do they have to do to make Trump happy?

Well it's borderline acceptable to indirectly forcing them to sell by threatening a ban, but to actively oversee the sale and micromanage it is far beyond the line.

> it's borderline acceptable to indirectly forcing them to sell

It really is not. One of the biggest horrors of the Trump years is the extent to which this kind of capricious executive action has been normalized. A ban is a ban. If you genuinely think an app poses a security risk, then you use one of the executive tools available to shut it down.

There was no "ban" enacted here. It was a bargaining chip used to muck with the markets in an outrageously explicit way. We don't do that in this country. Or we never did before.

The closest equivalent to this in terms of effect would have been the trust busting of the early 20th century. And that involved all three branches of government working over years. This happened because One Guy decided he didn't like TikTok.

Why the hell is the government putting it's nose up private deals like this and also asking for a cut?

This is the correct question to ask, but the answer is quite simple - because Donald Trump is corrupt and thinks he can get away with it.

You had a republic, can you keep it?

Silicon Valley letting this happen without even complaining a little: very disturbing.

I remember tech CEOs complains when h1B visas got cut bc they loved the cheap labor. Silicon valley only jumps in if it benefits their bottom line or for good PR

“Cheap labor” people with visa in FANG companies get paid the same salary as the non visa people, and it was the FANG ceos who complained, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.

TikTok is a black sheep because as soon as you defend it against the US, you’re painted as a Chinese shill advocating for Uighur genocide.

It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley is uninterested in defending it, despite the fact that this sort of deal is likely to severely fracture how tech services are treated by governments in the future.

It's sad that we are even looking to what stance tech companies have on human rights issues. The government should have sanctioned China severely already, tariffs, you name it.

Well in this case, ByteDance was the one that rejected the Microsoft/Walmart deal. Not the US President.

'ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft.' [0]

[0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/13/microsoft-statem...

Well that doesn’t mean much, the White House could have signaled to ByteDance on the DL that they’d torpedo any non-Oracle deal... who knows, banning a single company from operating domestically without any immediate proven national security threat is unprecedented, the president just does whatever he feels like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com