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Comment by angio | Hacker News Reader

Technically the companies are allowed to operate in China, but to do so they would need to follow the strict censorship and data sharing rules the Chinese government requires all companies to adopt. That's why, for example, Bing is available in China and Google not.

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My impression is that's really just a technicality though. If instead of a total ban imposed on these companies, the US imposed incredibly tough rules tailored for them but that applied to "all" foreigners that made it impossible for these companies to operate, the end result would be the same

> If instead of a total ban imposed on these companies, the US imposed incredibly tough rules tailored for them but that applied to "all" foreigners that made it impossible for these companies to operate, the end result would be the same

Or TikTok would change their business to operate within the limits of the new regulation, which is something that cannot happen with an outright ban. A good compromise is to do like the EU with GDPR and not ban companies directly but still require them to comply with local privacy laws if they want to access the market. Foreign companies that don't want to do it can simply block European users (effectively self-censoring themselves).

But Chinese companies do have to comply with these rules. China cares about total surveillance more than they care about blocking foreign competitors.

American companies live and die by their users, Chinese companies live and die by the Chinese government. What if the US imposed a rule that every company operating in the US has to sign a public declaration criticizing the Tiananmen Square massacre? Not an issue for any company in the world except for the Chinese ones. Just because a rule applies to everyone equally doesn't mean that it's providing an equal playing field.

That rule would be a problem for any company operating in China, not just Chinese companies.

But not in the US. My point was to illustrate that the Chinese equivalent situation is discriminatory against foreign companies even though it applies equally to all.

What about the requirement for a "local partner"?

> but to do so they would need to follow the strict...data sharing rules the Chinese government requires all companies to adopt.

A.K.A government surveillance and anti-privacy rules. For instance, I believe various data leaks have proved that Chinese police (down to the local level) get a literal feed of all public and private social media messages sent over Chinese apps. There's also a video floating around of some poor schmuck locked in a tiger chair by some Chinese police, being forced to apologize for talking smack about them in a private chat.

> Technically the companies are allowed to operate in China

So you are saying they are not blocked by the GFW?

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