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Comment by karp773 | Hacker News Reader

The very fact that not a single western social network is permitted to operate in China is a sufficient reason to ban TikTok in America.

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That argument makes no sense, because we do not want to mirror other countries.

Instead, there are substantial arguments about freedom of speech and accountability. Even though they are messy, they are what we need to apply here because they are a legally binding framework that we built over decades.

By the way, I found Levitski and Ziblatt's book "How Democracies Die" [1] a pretty good treatment of these issues of balancing freedom of expression and democratic resilience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die

I would make it as a free trade argument.

Trade is a 2 way street, if our companies can not compete there, then their companies should not be able to compete here.

American companies are allowed to operate in China, as long as they follow local regulation. If TikTok behaviour is concerning (it is, like google/facebook/etc are also concerning), then introduce regulations that protect users' privacy and only then ban TikTok.

The local regulation is to parter with a Chinese company to operate the service. Giving that company a substantial percentage of revenue.

And the ability to steal a substantial amount of your IP and start a copycat across the street.

Good. IP should not be a thing anyway.

And the ability for government/regulatory oversight.

As the other person said, Pretty sure they actually cant. Last I knew all China Business had to be majority owned by Chinese Citizens or CCP or both.

Americans can invest and have minority ownership in china but can not just "operate" in china like you can in the US as a Foreign company.

Infact this was the regulation trump wanted to impose on ByteDance, they needed an American partner to operate in the US, i.e they were in talks with Oracle before Biden reversed the order

Not really... you are out in left field here. The fundamental rule of international trade regulation is reciprocity within classes of goods and services. It flies in the face of basic WTO principles to allow one partner to ban a whole host of services without reciprocal penalties. In practice, this sort of reciprocity gets broken all the time, but it doesn't make sense to say "we don't want to mirror other countries" when in trade policy, mirroring is a basic mandate of the WTO framework.

Sorry but you're ignoring media regulation here, which is a completely domestic playbook and for the most part explicitly carved out of trade agreements.

For protection of domestic civic society, culture and public opinion, trade agreements are irrelevant. That's how the french got to keep their quota for french-language music in broadcasting, for example.

> That argument makes no sense, because we do not want to mirror other countries.

Tit-for-tat is literally how agreements around the world works.

"Reciprocity treaty" if you want to make it fancy sounding, but it's just "tit-for-tat" for Taxes, Tariffs, Visitor visa & rules, etc.

How does freedom of speech or more specifically the first amendment apply to a foreign owned and operated platform? If you reframed it as something else would it be different in your mind? Say, you had a foreign news service that employed American citizens to read news that was perhaps even sourced in part from American reporters but they editorialized it so that it always favored their side and belittled the American side. Would it be unconstitutional to forbid this entity to operate within the US?

Sounds like you're describing RT America, which operated unimpeded until fiscal realities forced it to withdraw from the country. Was it a scummy network? Yes. Was it protected by 1A? Also yes.

Ah 'fiscal realities' like 'unforeseen business interruption events' right? Gotta smooth things over when you can't just straight up seize assets.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57570044

If you don't like the chinese government, why do you want yours to imitate them?!

In this thread: people who don't understand the value of free trade agreements.

We should just open up everything and hope everyone plays fair!

"Free trade agreement" is a propaganda term for "trade agreement." It doesn't have a separate definition.

Remember when we tried? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/19/world/asia/mark-zuckerber...

Tit for tat strategy in game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

> not a single western social network

You are wrong. Myspace works fine in China.

This is, rather, evidence (as though we needed it) that Myspace isn't a social network.

Explain Linkedin.com then? It also works 100% well in China.

It's shut down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58911297

The abomination Linkedin.cn (force redirects, ads, bloat features) was shutdown but Linkedin.com is always accessible.

I don't believe this is correct.

How about run an actual multi site ping? Feel free to choose your own tool.

https://ping.chinaz.com/www.linkedin.com

https://ping.pe/www.linkedin.com

Are you in China and able to load it? I can tell you that it doesn't load from at least one region.

Ping tests are often misleading because datacenters have different connectivity than residential IPs.

You can test whereever you want, the point is "not a single western social network is permitted to operate in China" is factually false. Social networks are available if you aren't making "trouble" for the authorities. I am not trying to defend this or anything, the current state of affair is totally messed up, but still there are some global social networks exist in China.

btw, even 4chan is accessible in China. Imagine that.

Well, my only point is "[LinkedIn] works 100% well in China" is factually false.

If you want facts, linkedin.com still gets redirect to linkedin.cn(aka lingying.com) as of today

here's the output of curl -sv https://linkedin.com > /dev/null

* Trying 2620:1ec:21::14...

* TCP_NODELAY set

* Connected to linkedin.com (2620:1ec:21::14) port 443 (#0)

< HTTP/1.1 302 Found

< Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2022 09:51:33 GMT

< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

< Content-Language: en

< X-Li-Fabric: prod-lor1

< Location: https://www.linkedin.cn/incareer/hp/

The bottom of the page says:

ICP Filing Number: 14023203

ICP License Number: 150024

PSB Filing Number: 11030102010420

Human Resources Service License: 110401715069

Beijing LingYin Information Technology Co. Ltd

Room 817, Floor 8, Building 18, No.1 Disheng North Street, Yizhuang District

Customer Service Email: cs@lingying.com

Customer Service Hotline: 4000106277

Report Email: jubao@lingying.com

Microsoft forgot to shutdown "local version".

So technically it's still 100% working well with all bells and whistles in China.

So what's your argument this time?

Interesting that it connects (and sad that MS is doing IP-based redirects). I asked a friend in Shanghai and she said it didn't load, but don't think I can ask her to troubleshoot.

> So what's your argument this time?

Your past couple of comments have been weirdly aggressive. I don't have an agenda.

> she said it didn't load

Networks in China are crappy in general, if your friend has some bad VPN setup I can assure it will mess up something like DNS? Or even worse, if she is using the App, the Linkedin.cn would likely to break API stuff with forced redirects (that's why I call it abomination)

> been weirdly aggressive

Because something WRONG is on the Internet? LOL. IDK man. https://xkcd.com/386/ I hate "tech jornalism" like the BBC one because most of them are bad. In this Linkedin case it was sophistecated enough that people can get inaccurate conclusions based on problems on the surface. But for HN audience I hope people would verify by themselves more.

Also did you even read TFA you linked?

> we are going to sunset the localised version of LinkedIn in China later this year

I read it and followed it quite closely when it happened.

You can't commit corporate espionage against US companies without getting a job first.

I've heard an apt anology; "its a reverse opium war"

Not really reverse, since the US didn't participate in the first one.

Oh, I didnt realise Tik Tok was US only.

Well funnily enough the only place where it's not is Hong Kong.

But to the opium war analogy, most of the world was not involved.

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