Free markets are creating a major free speech problem

Articles like this are usually very cutting in their criticism but devoid of actionable suggestions. Kudos to Matt Yglesias for cutting right to the chase at the end:

>So what should we do? A boring but earnest place to start would be with some good old-fashioned congressional hearings.

>I think ultimately, members of Congress should make the point that the downside of television news coming under the control of Chinese censors for the American people is extremely large, while the upside of U.S.-based conglomerates gaining access to the lucrative Chinese box office is modest. So even if the censorship risk is low, the cost-benefit isn’t there, and unless the companies can offer very clear guarantees, we should look at passing laws that would break up these conglomerates.

He also pre-empts the potential issues with this:

>To get there, legislators are going to need to try to actually address the issue and not just use it to lob tomatoes at each other or call various people hypocrites.

I think this is understated. The average citizen does care about corporations groveling to Chinese censors, but cares way more about what it means for culture wars (as can already be seen in this very thread). So there's a prisoner's dilemma between the Left and the Right on top of the preexisting one between these corporations and the sincere bipartisan consensus that wants to counter the "Chinese chilling effect".

> But Disney doesn’t just make movies, they own ABC, and ABC has a news channel. NBC Universal puts out movies and wants access to the China market, but they also run MSNBC and NBC News. CNN is owned by the same conglomerate as HBO and the Discovery channel. So far, all these news stations still run critical reporting about China, and good for them.

It's easy to brush off Disney not putting Chinese villains in their movies as inconsequential, but this could easily extend to influencing American media. It can start with preventing criticism of Chinese domestic issues, but can easily extend to psy-ops or pretty much anything. I don't have faith that large corporate CEOs have any well defined line they're willing to draw when it comes to getting orders from China.

We've already seen the influence China has over the WHO, which is odd since they only contribute $57M to the organization, compared to $116M by the US, $29M by Germany and $22M by UK. [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167

FWIW Amnesty International has been calling out Apple's kowtowing to China and invasion of privacy for the last three years, but it's been falling on mostly deaf ears:

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/china-social-media...

More to the author's point, in a free market you can have consumer watchdogs providing transparency, but even they can still be drowned out by "privacy"-based branding from giants.

We need a new term to use alongside the now-overloaded "free speech". John Cena was free to call Taiwan a country and was not in danger of being arrested for it. However the CCP and it's horde of nationalist supporters forced his apology for financial reasons related to the movie release. So is that a free speech problem or a capital influence problem?

It is sad to see what has happened to the US. Our captains of industry are tripping over themselves to get bullied by China and let them steal IP, and the government is completely unable to counter China's soft power.

So we're integrating our market more with China's market, making the relationship less one-sided. Some economists have argued that China is actually more economically free than the West in certain areas (like the overhead involved in starting a new business), though I'd say we're at least slightly better off here overall.

However, the West definitely has China beat in the area of free speech. Speech and the market are intertwined at various levels, so we'll see friction there. I'd say it has less to do with market freedom (of either participant) and more to do with China simply not having anything close to free speech.

Whether we decide to stand our ground on this or not is a separate question. One good way to do it at least for the internet is to favor open, non-proprietary systems that aren't controlled by any one profit-focused company. That way we don't all have to suffer the consequences when a single company like Google bends the knee to China for their own financial gain, and leaves the rest of us holding the bag on the reduced free speech front.

This quote sums up the article.

> China seems to have successfully entrenched a new norm where multinational corporations and most celebrities know to preemptively self-censor

The low level society problem is that American business conducts vapid, myopic cash grabs to sustain its self. China has identified this and exploits it.

See also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy

(wherein Blizzard, a US company, bans a player at a conference for displaying support for Hong Kong's autonomy.)

> But at the signing ceremony in October 2000, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert said the deal was about more than money: “you know what — we open it up so that we can exchange ideas and values and culture. And that's an important thing.”

https://www.axios.com/hollywood-casting-china-colorism-light...

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina...

I don't think that anyone actually believed that opening trade with china was going to "spread liberal values" there. That's what we were told instead of the truth, which is that we opened trade with china so that american companies could produce goods without having to comply with those pesky american labor regulations.

> Free markets are creating a major free speech problem

No. Greed (money at all costs) + Free markets have a vulnerability to totalitarian regimes and their coincidence are creating a problem. This is not a bug of free markets, but a bug of people valuing the money over nearly _everything else_ including the willingness to overlook issues with fallong gong, tibet, uyghurs genocide, hong kong crack down etc.

No one said that the path of integrity would optimize for income. We should not be surprised when values costs us something (monetarily).

You also don't get access to use US military hardware and locations if you don't give DoD final cut of your big-budget blockbuster.

Governments gonna government.

That is good, without free market we could not see their capital influence.

This assumes that "free speech" ought to flow mostly in one direction, from the US out to other countries.

There was a time where a sense of national pride and shame would discourage people from kow-towing to oppressive regimes.

But now after decades of being told how terrible we are and shameful our history is, that no longer exists.

So all thats left is making money...