ByteDance won't sell TikTok U.S. operations to Oracle or Microsoft: CGTN

For China, the problem with Facebook isn't control or censorship, but rather providing protectionism for their own brands, i.e. WeChat.

I don't know what the latest is [0], but 5 years back following these laws meant you'd have to be a standard domestic company which a non-citizen cannot incorporate or own.

[0] China has a tendency of introducing new mechanisms giving impression of potential for more access that never pan out. Back in the day AWS was promised unprecedented terms in a Shanghai free trade zone. Was supposed to have access to unfiltered connections. None of that has ever happened and "AWS China" is now just a cloud service operated by Chinese companies under the AWS brand.

Even YC fell for this with their China operation now being 100% China-run leeching off their brand. Though I don't know if anything was being promised to them.

The point being made is that government intervention is a given in China at every level.

You can argue either way on if it’s “right” for the US to be doing it too, but it’s a bit rich to make a song and dance about how unfair it is under the circumstances.

I’m 100% happy to agree governments in general, should keep out of this stuff, but that’s not the world we live in, or have lived in, for a very long time...

/shrug

It sucks, but it’s kind of hard to be sympathetic, honestly.

You reap what you sow.

This is exactly what China does to foreign companies who wish to operate in China. The US is simply pursuing a model of reciprocal trade protections and tariffs.

the chinese government forces them to "sell" (i.e. "partner" where the partner is given significant concessions that would never happen without the chinese government's protection, including ownership over IP).

honestly, if one views the US in a trade war with china, then there is a concept of "national security" (in a wide view of the term, I'd agree not the traditional view in the US, but probably closer to how china views the term) to allowing chinese companies access to the US market that are not reciprocated in China.

heck, the fact that they want to "partner" is probably indicative of how the chinese view the issue. i.e. US companies have to have a chinese "partner" to enter china, so to do the same in the US, they seek out a US partner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#...

And US didn't build islands, sure - it just gets CIA to overthrow governments and replace them with ones much friendlier to their business.

Of course, no one is saying that the countries are equivalent. Just that superpowers are going to do evil superpower shit.

2001 Afghanistan and 2003 Iraq war, hundreds of thousands of Muslim men were imprisoned without trial. And they were proper prisons not dormitories.

Can you find me some photos of these "concentration camps"? Because I can go searching for US detention centers from that time and it's not pretty.

Thought experiment: place a teleporter from Xinjiang to just south of the US border. Suddenly it's possible for the oppressed Uighurs to escape and cross the border into the US. What happens to them?

I suspect they'd simply end up in a different internment camp.

I think the internment of Japanese in America during WWII is similar in concept. [0]

You could cherry-pick situations for nearly any country to suggest they are good or evil. Reality is that most countries have done a lot of good and a lot of bad. I’m not sure that we’ll reach a conclusion to the discussion topic “is China worse than America” just by giving examples of how they are each bad!

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

But the US has done it for plenty of other groups.

"As part of the Great Firewall, beginning in 2003 China started the Golden Shield Project, a massive surveillance and censoring system, the hardware for which was provided by mostly U.S. companies, including Cisco Systems. "

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

It doesn't take huge technical skills that exist only in SV to build alternatives to US internet companies. The reason why China and Russia have their own alternatives but the EU and UK don't is because they let US steamroll into their markets. FB and other US companies were early or had better funding and got the lead, network effect kicked in and they dominated. When a country blocks you off, your funding and network effect is no more.

In other words, the moat of the US internet companies is not their tech but their network and that network can be made anaemic by countries who want to have their local alternatives, as seen with Russia and China.

Even in places where that tech expertise doesn't exists someone will build white label solutions and sell them.

Sure but it is about how you fix them. Suddenly it is becoming acceptable for governments to control the access to services of their citizens - much like the way China & Russa used to do since ever. These things have far reaching implications beyond business, it's not like putting high tax on imports.

China employs child labor, should USA start using child labour too to compete with China?

If it's not obvious already, I am not fan of China's way of doing things and what I am advocating is that the west should be tackling the issues without becoming China. Yes, I get it, china blocks Facebook but the answer to that should't be blocking TikTok because this means that China got it right and the way forward is being like China.

If we have learned anything in the last decade, it is that globalization has just let us externalize the costs of western behavior and focus those costs in Asia (temporarily) until it comes back to bite us.

I.e. short term thinking out of wall st/washington

Other countries simply don't have the power to project their interests globally. For example Iran doesn't assassinate top US generals with drones. I imagine they would like to, they just can't. If it ever became apparent that other countries were on track to developing tools that the US can't control, the US would simply strike preemptively (this applies to weapons, as well as economic matters - TikTok, Huawei etc.).

> Anyway, I question the factualality of the superpower status. The US wasn't able to impose its will on even a minor warlord such as Mohammed Farrah Aidid. He stayed, the US soldiers withdrew.

I don't know the case of Aidid specifically, so I can't comment on it. I do know however that if the US is interested enough in something to happen, that thing will happen almost certainly, almost anywhere. I can only assume that Somalia was not that important for US interests.

If you’d like to paint them as equally entwined, please cite your sources.

Remember, when JFK was doing diplomatic tours around Europe they had prostitutes ready for him at hotels. The current American president’s behavior is par for the course.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53633315

Your post implies that the president expects to directly benefit financially from the sale of TikTok.

(indeed, this is why Trump's "drain the swamp" pitch was so effective, despite being even more corrupt!)

Yes, perhaps. Perhaps also the Pacific Ocean has some water and perhaps the sky is above the land and perhaps the Sun rises is the East.

Does anyone not think Bloomberg is corrupt?

> You can also see how using 'guilt by association' here makes no sense with Oracle if we keep thinking that 'Bloomberg LP is supporting Biden.'

But the argument here wasn't guilt by association—that some one was bad because they were associated with someone else that is bad.

It was that an action was taken to appeal to Trump by dealing with a firm known to be associated with and presumed to be favored by him. No one is guilty by association in that presentation.