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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Google’s approach to China is the same realpolitik as Apple and privacy.

Google was never going to get what it wanted/needed in China, so walking away was a pragmatic stance projected as an act of courage, etc.

Google and Apple are actually more similar than one would thing. They are both leveraging their ownership of powerful segments, and they are both threatened by integrated software stacks. The big difference is that Google does creepy shit as a first party, and Apple outsources that to third parties.

Google’s ad business was hurt by Facebook/Instagram and the dearb of the web. Apple’s existential threat is someone making WeChat for the US.

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> Google was never going to get what it wanted/needed <with the CCP>

That is not at all accurate. The CCP attempted to infiltrate Google's internal systems by having spies get jobs inside of Google. The CCP also blocked all google services and then developed identical ones to compete with Google globally.

The CCP is extremely nefarious. Any government that blocks children from reading an encyclopedia should be considered to be committing a crime against humanity.

> The CCP attempted to infiltrate Google's internal systems by having spies get jobs inside of Google.

You think the CCP hasn't done this in the US with all relevant companies?

> Apple’s existential threat is someone making WeChat for the US.

It's called Signal.

You fundamentally misunderstand what WeChat is.

WeChat in China is like early 1990s era AOL or Prodigy for smartphones - it’s a vertical solution.

Signal is an encrypted messenger that have bolted on some crypto bullshit. It’s just a nerd tool.

They are only vaguely similar in the remotest of ways and certainly not with respect to what the OP meant, so not really.

no, if you look at relevance today Signal is not relevant.

The technical excellency is lost on most users.

The demography which cares about that excellency also has a large degree of people which don't want a future with a western variant of WeChat. Because it's basically only working with monopolization.

And the fact that signal pushed some crypto is not helping it either. Firstly to many non technical people have lost too much money by either crypto scams or crashes. Then their crypto currency had some questionable technical details AFIK, but I forgot the details. Then regulatory capture of crypto currencies is guaranteed incoming in the coming years (to many scams, market manipulation, hidden high risk investment and usage for crimes especially money laundering) and as far I can tell their coin will likely not get a pass.

...and his name is Musk.

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