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Comment by snehk | Hacker News Reader

China didn't specifically "ban" US social networks because they were US social networks. The companies themselves didn't want to comply with Chinese laws so they cannot operate there.

It's the same as Facebook now threatening to leave the EU if they have to comply with EU data protection laws.

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China structures things overwhelmingly in favor of its domestic companies to the point of ridiculousness. It's well past simple tariffs when you need joint ventures, a license to operate a website, source code disclosure, key escrow, government censors, Taiwan/Tibet/Hong Kong/Uiyghur tiptoeing, and who knows what else.

A US company operating in China under its own international brand is a sucker who fell for a pretty blatant con.

US companies go to China because they want to make money. Pure and simple. China has laws, that they need to comply with. Nobody is being forced to do things, in one side or another. If US companies want to operate overseas, they need to follow other countries rules, the same way that happens inside the US. If US companies don't want to make money from the Chinese market, they can just chose to leave.

They didn't want to comply with laws requiring giving the Chinese government full access to their data.

It really doesn't matter. We can say that it's good that companies like Google or Facebook don't want to be part in any of this or we can say that even the slightest interest in user privacy makes it morally impossible for companies to operate in China. What's simply not true is the idea that Google or Facebook not being in China has anything to do with them being American companies.

Well I mean the US kinda does that too. That's why Schrems II was able to invalidate EU-US Privacy Shield.

1) In FB's own words: https://about.fb.com/news/2022/02/meta-is-absolutely-not-thr... so mass media just put the word into FB's mouth

2) On "China didn't ban ...", that's the case for Google and Linkedin China, but it's actually a kind of "soft" ban that the cost to meet the regulatory requirements is too high to afford even for biggest companies in the world.

3) FB case was a bit different. It was never given any opportunity to operate in China, so FB didn't "chose" to leave. We would never know what FB would do if given the chance. Maybe leave all user data there inside the great wall, as Apple does in its special version of iCloud in China.

Not quite. The Great Firewall of China has the ability to shut off access to specific sites, services, and even communications protocols very easily and very effectively. Trying to access Google from China doesn't result in a page from Google apologizing that they won't comply with Chinese laws. It's as if the services simply doesn't exist and you get a 404 error.

Also, Google actually has a sizeable office in Beijing. I'm not sure what they do specifically since it's not easy to access any of their public services without an obscure VPN (the most popular ones get blocked pretty quickly).

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