US moves to force ByteDance to sell TikTok
semafor.com
semafor.com
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40139681
It's like buying KFC without the secret recipe.
I love TikTok. After HN, it's the place where I get most of my tech news.
US market is great to have, but there is still the rest of the world too
When the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020,^1 Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue. Of the top 50 most-followed accounts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>, 21 of 50 are American.
^1 And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
But that’s life, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
The resistance to it on this forum, of all places, is kind of incredible.
This is all a case of “Corp can’t compete? Lobby to ban.”
This is bog standard capitalism.
For bonus points, disinformation hogwash that helps one of the most un-progressive governments in the world (China) extend it's power.
Furthermore, a US judge could presumably just order to take down their DNS globally. Furthermore they can presumably compel Apple and Google to remove the app from the store.
No need to bother with actual technical "blocking" measures.
Otherwise I can just conclude that there's a double standard about this kind of thing here.
A bad side effect of the enorm economic and military power of the US.
But then again China has a way worse track record when it comes to banning US/EU social media companies on their turf.
Control the media and people's ability to consume information but give people the illusion it's free and open.
Platforms such as this, and any Western one is tightly controlled.
Tiktok, the outlier and it needs to be brought into the fold asap. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube's censorship of Gaza's conflict are abiding by the memo by silencing voices speaking up.
> Some have only been “free” less than 100 years.
And what about now? Yes, they should've been free from the start. We fought a civil war over this. If you want to hold countries to the standard of the things they've done in the past, then you're ignoring some very big gorillas in the room by pointing your finger at the USA.
It is very telling that concern over freedom shows first in your reply as “yeah but capitalism.”
> It is very telling that concern over freedom shows first in your reply as “yeah but capitalism.”
No, I just had a look at your previous comments and recognized a tired pattern one finds repeated ad nauseam by wannabe communists on Reddit. I didn't feel like making a comment that would just get a reply along the lines of "you've activated my anti-capitalism trap card".
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/biden-s-order-terminates...
But yeah - I do tend to blame capital on herec(hn) lots because, I’ll be honest, hn is a capitalist mob spawner of sorts. :)
> The history of the United States is not only steeped in oppression
The history of the entire world is steeped in oppression.
In the tech sector, for example, what came after the 20+ year old United States v. Microsoft Corp. anti trust case that concluded w/out breaking up Microsoft and soft balled the penalty?
Has that acted as a real deterrent in the tech sector, or is it just a footnote about how hard anti monopoly cases can be in practice?
There are considerable restrictions in finance, health care and a number of other industries. Relevant to this case, there have been restrictions on foreign ownership of radio and TV stations for a very long time. It’s why Murdoch became a US citizen.
Take for example Chinese EVs, if everything stays the same they will outcompete us and instead of approaching this with better engineering and innovation we’re starting to hear about how those cars may be spying on us. Soon to be banned for our own “safety”.
Yeah, and as an American, I'm so sick of hearing about "capitalism and the free market" that my first impulse is to support anything that irks the monomaniacal believers in those things. They're broken records and it's tiresome.
Democracy and capitalism both dies when corporations take over.
The caveat being they expect data and servers etc to be present within China and unlike the EU don't allow data to leave China. The penalties are also much much higher.
There are also rules around applying censorship and other requirements, not dissimilar from operating in Thailand, Vietnam, India and probably other markets but those are the 3 I'm very familiar with.
Google previously was happy enough with this arrangement but eventually pulled out. They had very poor market penetration, Baidu then (and now) enjoys a near monopoly on search similar to Google in the US. I imagine that was the key reason rather than the rules themselves as they operate in other very restrictive markets without complaint.
Facebook would have an awful time trying to compete in China tbh. The market is just way too competitive with way too many absolutely cutthroat market participants, completely unlike the US market which was pretty much stagnant before TikTok showed up.
These companies don't enter China for the same reason why many companies don't. Domestic competition there is just too damn tough. If your market isn't already in race to the bottom stage in China it always descends into it pretty quickly because of the rate people clone and adopt similar ideas. If you don't have an unfair advantage you need to be very innovative to stay ahead.
For example, the only countries that bans the entirety of Wikipedia is China and Myanmar, and China has done that much longer. The scale and severity of Chinas censorship is on a whole different level from any other country. Russia censors a few wikipedia pages, China just bans the entire thing, those two are nowhere close and one is much harder to deal with. The other countries that banned wikipedia did so for only a limited period of time or just a small subset.
You mean non-Chinese content? Chinese users aren't interested in non-Chinese content by and large. English literacy is better now than it was when Google pulled out and it's still pretty bad.
Dealing with the censorship is trivial. The problem was they couldn't compete on merits and got absolutely dunked by Baidu on search and maps (though there is a ton of competition in maps these days, namely Amap and Gaode Map but it was true when Google pulled out). Primarily because of localisation (because it's natively Chinese) and also because Baidu looks and works like the rest of the Chinese web.
For similar reasons Yahoo is still huge in Japan. It looks and feels Japanese. Google does not.
I really reject the idea that Google failed because of censorship. All of their Chinese competitors had the same restrictions and came out on top is all.
Furthermore even free trade (which the US doesn‘t exactly practice) does not mean allowing foreign adversaries (which China arguably is) to undermine the political system which is democratic (which they may not do yet but there is no need to enable them to being able to choose to do it later).
Companies love open standards, at first. They love them to get traction but once they have the majority locked down, use it to force others out. Same with "free" markets.
Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.