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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Don't complain when the rest of the world starts doing the same with American companies.

You just made OP's point. China is already doing exactly that.

It’s not OP’s point at all. Americans want sovereignty over their own social media but gladly benefit from pushing Facebook and google dominance over the world. Big tech / Silicon Valley wouldn’t be the same if it would just be US only

It’s one way direction and it’s hypocrisy.

There exists a policy that avoids hypocrisy: reciprocity.

Treat the EU companies the way the EU treats American companies and treat Chinese companies the way China treats American companies.

China doesn't give American social media companies access to China, so we shouldn't give Chinese social media companies access to America.

The EU imposes all sorts of privacy requirements and data locality restrictions on American companies. Impose those same restrictions but only on companies from the EU.

This doesn't make much sense. At the highest level, America imports more than it exports. I struggle to look at that and call it a one way street.

It's a simple case of reciprocity. If China wants to ban American social media networks then America should obviously respond in kind.

At least in this case, China is already doing the same and worse, some reciprocal response is decades overdue. This is barely a start.

Any company in any country that over-collects and/or misuses the personal information of its users (or anyone) should be penalized in the same way.

Where are the Americans claiming otherwise? It's perplexing to see all this shadowboxing with a made-up argument that we shouldn't hold FB to the same standard as Tiktok.

Good. US dominance and oligopolies, at least in the tech sector, have stifled competition and innovation in the global economy. Everyone, including people in the US, would benefit from increased competition that monopolies have snuffed out for years, now.

I encourage the rest of the world to do everything they can to weaken the grip of social media companies with >100M users. All companies that big, really.

You know that other countries do just that especially China.

What are the cases of such events?

How many Google businesses operate in China?

Banned in china: Google Gmail Google Play Google Maps Google Drive Google News Facebook Facebook Messenger Instagram Twitter Reddit Tumblr Pinterest WhatsApp Snapchat Slack Viber Line Discord Telegram Signal Wikipedia Dropbox OneDrive Blogger WordPress Medium Quora BBC The New York Times The Guardian The Washington Post Daily Mail CBC (Canada) ABC (Australia) Spotify SoundCloud Amazon Music Pandora Tinder Pornhub XVideos Chaturbate Twitch PlayStation Coinbase Binance

Plus NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) the most absurd one I've found so far.

A few high-profile examples:

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

You can also pick one, and check with a tool like this:

https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin...

None of these are banned. They simply choose to not operate in China, because the laws require them hand over user data. So they choose to monopolize those data themselves, which is allowed in US and so called "free" nations. Go figure how ridiculous that is.

Yes, some of those are banned. Banned means to prohibit, especially by legal means. These websites are not reachable from mainland China, so they are banned in mainland China.

Their operation wasn't suspended for a compliance reason. This article lists some of those, and their (suspected) reason for the ban:

https://www.businessinsider.com/major-us-tech-companies-bloc...

Then there are a lot of Chinese companies are banned from US market.

What's your point?

The point is there is no moral high ground in economic competition.

Dear Europeans; Please stop threatening that and start actually doing it. Please. Americans taking these American companies down a peg seems completely intractable. Please Europeans, you are the best hope we have. Ban American tech companies!

The EU is just an American puppet though - there is no investment or support for European alternatives or FOSS projects, etc.

Huh? The EU’s GDP and population are significantly greater than the US.

And yet Europe is more or less dependent on the US for defense. That’s probably the bigger lever.

US GDP is bigger than the EU's https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

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