Hacker News Reader

Comment by holmesworcester | Hacker News Reader

> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China.

And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.

"Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."

We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.

View on HN

The bill doesn’t block access to TikTok, it blocks US companies from doing business with TikTok. So it isn’t exactly a ban, or censorship.

If TikTok wants to give up the revenue, they can continue to send propaganda to the US, and kids can continue to watch and make videos.

China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.

Telling a business it's free to do something if there's no profit involved is like telling a man he's free to drink whiskey if he can jump over the moon.

Here comes Elon with another hold my beer moment. Thank god he already wasted billions on Twitter.

This bill will force google/apple to remove the tiktok app store listing. It's as good as dead after that with no updates/new installs.

give a dog a bad name and it's as good as dead.

Nah, people are too addicted. They'll follow steps to install an apk, even if they're nontechnical.

I bet you that would become a thing at school, getting the geekier kids to "install tiktok 4 me pls"

You underestimate how many people in the U.S. have iPhones.

> China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.

China does way more than that. China forces all companies that wish to do business in China to host their data in China in a way that ensures the CCP has complete access to it.

It boggles the mind how some anonymous accounts try to attack the US for interfering with a Chinese company doing business in the US, particularly one which is a notorious security hole, but leave out the fact that CCP's China goes well beyond as a matter of policy.

it boggles the mind that everyone is complaining about tiktok and yet, each of the big cloud providers have data centers in china, hey but dont worry guys, they're physically separated honest

If you start a business in the US and you're only adding China DC's specifically for Chinese customers, I don't see why you'd invest more time and money in connecting the CCP to your US DC's.

It would make more sense that Chinese customers would want to host their data in the US not vice versa, and in that case you would treat them the same as American customers in American data centers with the same security in place.

It's the cheaper solution, caters to all customer needs, and doesn't risk your customers' faith.

I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't separate them.

Do you have some reason to believe they aren't or are you just guessing that they wouldn't take precautions? Because in this case, the precautions are actually the easier topology to build, I think.

It boggles my mind how people look at China's censorship regime and think, "wow we are so far behind in the censorship race, we must move in that direction and start banning things ASAP"

The goal is not censorship, this is completely obvious.

The US is doing great at achieving this non-goal then.

The U.S. might be doing that, you just don't know because that kind of thing comes with gag orders making it a federal offense to even reveal that any such thing is occurring.

I'm absolutely not defending China's authoritarian regime and overall the U.S. isn't seems less bad, but at the same time it's a bit rich to pretend the U.S. doesn't do the same if it matters.

China passed data law after US and Europe, actually very similar law.

Also China does not stop companies to do business with Facebook and Google, if you look up numbers from Facebook and Google, a big chunk ad revenue would come from Chinese companies.

China is banned. TikTok isn't banned. You're conflating those to say that TikTok is banned, but your argument is what applies to China, not TikTok.

In the same sense, it's not Google that's banned in China. It's free speech. Google just can't operate without it so it decided to exit the market by refusing to allow CCP access to user data and to implement CCP firewalls.

You can conflate things to make them sound like the same thing. Words can have subjective and loose meaning.

But reality is very complex and very specific and doesn't have any loose meaning. And this is not remotely the same thing.

Why is that improbable? Study your history. Merck was nationalized during WWI (that's why there's two mercks).

> And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.

Well that’s the crux, isn’t it.

If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.

If TikTok isn’t merely a business but rather an organ of soft power, and China blocks a sale, then the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community are confirmed.

> If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.

Using that logic, facebook, google, etc are not businesses either since they chose to be banned from china.

The stance of the US is that ByteDance has to sell off what is already a separate product (TikTok).

Google, Facebook etc don't have a "Chinese market" product at all, so there's nothing to sell off. If they did have a Chinese market product, worth many tens of billions of dollars, they would very likely sell it rather than spike it.

That's weak if common logic. Wealthy people burn a lot of money out of spite, constantly.

Essentially, you are asking everyone to assume that Bytdance does not really have a financial choice in the matter, and therefore financial irrationality is evidence of corruption.

When the reality is that the money may not mean as much to them as you are asking people to assume, and that in lieu of a payout they'd rather not reward a sale to the country that is strong-arming them. Which few with financial flexibility, and a healthy ego, would.

ByteDance would sell, but China is blocking it for export restrictions. It does not confirm anything. China is not a business, and it will look bad if US can force ByteDance to sell. You are mixing up ByteDance and China. China is not responsible for returns to ByteDance shareholders.

> "Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."

It's only improbable if the suspicion is true, and in that case: good riddance.

Also TikTok apparently isn't even allowed in China they have their own version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com