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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

> demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held

This is a reductive and misleading analysis. The US has already prohibited foreign entities from holding broadcast/common carrier licenses, or from owning significant chunks of equity in holders of those licenses [1]. It should be kind of obvious why a country would not want their biggest media providers to be foreign-owned.

You could argue that if the US wants to update the 1934 telecommunications act for the 21st century, it should do so more thoughtfully and comprehensively (I would agree). But the TikTok ban, however poorly written or haphazardly targeted, is fairly in line with a legal doctrine that has been commonly known and accepted for 90 years.

[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...

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> The US has already prohibited foreign entities from holding broadcast/common carrier licenses, or from owning significant chunks of equity in holders of those licenses

But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.

It IS wrong for them to determine what we can and can't be influenced by. By saying bad countries "influencing" us is bad for democracy, they are saying democracy isn't really up to us, the voters, it's up to them. And I'll never accept that.

When China does it, it's authoritarian. But when the USA does it, it is to protect our freedoms. It's totally different! /s

> But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.

The end result of your line of thought isn't the return of TikTok, it's the creation of an internet hosting licensing scheme in the US.

> But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.

Whether you _should_ need a license to distribute a media app in the US under certain conditions, and whether “Americans” (which ones?) really do want no limits on who controls their media, is the correct debate to be having. The person I was responding to believed the issue to be “US demands local ownership of TikTok just because it's successful and valuable” which is clearly wrong.

> obvious why a country would not want their biggest media providers to be foreign-owned

Tt's obvious why the state would not want it. It's not obvious why "country" would not want it.

This is a great argument for the rest of us banning nearly all US social media tech from our countries. Frankly I'd support it given the new US government.

Especially with our billionaires openly declaring they are working with the oncoming administration because other powers like the EU trying to enforce their laws within their borders. China is just on top of the game since they are a provider instead of a consumer.

China and Russia and others like them are definitely way ahead. And the way I see this going is that countries take their digital borders far more seriously in the future. The era of the open internet is gone, and I don't particularly think it should be mourned.

Digital borders should only be open and allow free traffic between allies.

edit: since it won't let me reply to posters under here. What I mean is in stopping foreign propaganda and interference. Elon Musk can't spend hundreds of millions to influence e.g. the Chinese people in ways that benefit the US.

I don't think many people separate out the "incoming" and "outgoing" aspects of firewalls, and conflate firewalls with censorship. Most of the countries that employ firewalls do both, censor as well as protect. But it's not a requirement that you must censor your own people in order to stop foreign agents interfering in your society.

This is quite literally what banning TikTok is about. Suddenly the US has decided that they don't like it when other countries do to them what the US routinely does to others.

What do you mean by way ahead?

US owns most of the social networks, video streaming platforms and most of the classic media (tv,...).

The diffrence is, that countries like US (and many EU countries) point a finger at china/russia and accuse them of censorship, claim themselves to be free, and then do the same censorship that russia/china do.

> Digital borders should only be open and allow free traffic between allies.

Oh, how far we have fallen.

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Nation states saw this, laughed, and proceeded to colonize the Internet almost immediately. The US is notable for (until recently) being the most open, but China basically never allowed unrestricted international network traffic. In fact, I honestly think China shouldn't have been allowed onto the global Internet on the basis of "no free speech for censors".

Especially when these companies soak up millions to billions of $$$s in ad spending and pay close to zero tax.

Exactly. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The EU should be watching this closely.

When I do a search on Google I give Google information. When Google gives me the results I get information. This data exchange or information barter involves “value” but no money is exchanged. Thus no taxes. This happens billions of times daily across all social media platforms. The analogy above is that data is gold is not far from reality and the data economy is mostly untaxed.

I think focussing on the micro is also a distraction here. An individuals data has almost no marginal value. But if you aggregate everyone's data then it does become valuable. This is why the whole 'just pay me for my data' argument never works.

By extension focussing on the negative impact on an individual is very small, but the overall impact on society and culture is massive (which in turn impacts individuals).

Taking that a step further I think you can argue there is some tragedy of the commons occurring which indicates govt. regulation should exist. Govt regulating media is tough, but as the US showing here, a rule getting rid of foreign actors might be a good idea for many countries.

And nothing of value would be lost. Just like with TikTok “going dark”.

Wouldn't that eliminate 90% of social media in your country?

...and nothing of value would be lost.

Yes, which is wonderful as new alternatives would grow. It's not like this stuff is rocket science, it's pretty trivial to build.

You make that sound like it's a bad thing. There's extremely little genuine value left in social media platforms to the average user these days. Most are completely focused on getting you to want to doom scroll, not actually connect with friends.

Maybe its time to go back to a simpler MySpace or FriendsReunited style setup for actual social media. The problem is theres not much money in that, nor are people likely to visit as regularly.

You could still have "X Germany" or whatever, that cross-syndicates content with other "X $COUNTRY" companies. But it would be a local company, under the jurisdiction of local laws -- and that seems to be the point.

Do it

It is my limited understanding that's the case in China?

The point being that there are countries other than the US and China.

Given that Elon Musk is supporting neo-Nazis in Germany,[0] banning Twitter/X is not a bad idea.

0. The neo-Nazis in question are the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD has many high-ranking members with neo-Nazi pasts, such as the leader of the party in the state of Thüringen, Björn Höcke, who used to write for a neo-Nazi publication under a pseudonym, "Landolf Ladig" (remind you of any other name?). This guy now runs the AfD in the state of Thüringen, the state where the AfD performs the best, electorally (33%, making them the largest party in the state). There are many other high-ranking AfD members with similar neo-Nazi pasts and affiliations. Then there are those who merely go on and on about immigrants, foreigners, minorities, but who are smart enough not to have explicitly associated themselves with open neo-Nazis. Needless to say, the fact that this sort of party is reaching 33% in some parts of the country is hugely concerning in Germany.

It is and EU started doing this more than a decade ago and has come fairly far. GDPR and other privacy focused regulation made great strides in restricting what US platforms are allowed to do in EU, and for government institutions there has been some movement away from US owned cloud services as a matter of national security and data protection. So far the reaction for US companies has been mostly to setup EU-only versions, or policies where data remains on EU located servers, but there was also a lot of "threats" about Facebook leaving EU or other sites blocking EU users as a response to those regulations.

The next round of regulations, NIS2 for example, is starting to get up steam. This year we also have the Digital Services Act. Time will tell if US media platforms continue to develop EU-versions, and in what forms, or if they give up.

In term of national security I would be a bit more afraid of Microsoft 365 than Meta.

> obvious why a country would not want their biggest media providers to be foreign-owned.

And yet many countries have no objection with letting their citizens use US FAANG services?

They should, and they should develop home-grown alternatives to these services. It's not that Tiktok shouldn't be banned, it's that Facebook and Twitter should also be banned. Megacorps should to be destroyed up regardless of their nation of origin.

> Megacorps should to be destroyed

In your view:

a) what is a megacorp (criteria), and

b) why do you think they should be destroyed?

For reference, the largest 15 companies in the world, by:

- Market cap are: Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Saudi Aramco, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, TSMC, Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, JPMorgan, Eli Lilly, Visa

- by # of employees: Walmart, Amazon, Foxconn, Accenture, VW, Tata, DHL, BYD, Compass, Jingdong, UPS, Gazprom, Home Depot, JD Logistics, Agricultural Bank of China.

- by earnings: Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, NVIDIA, JP Morgan Chase, Meta, Amazon, ICBC, China Construction Bank, China Pacific Insurance, Exxon Mobil, Agricultural Bank of China, Toyota

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

I don't think megacorps should be "destroyed". On the other hand, I do think that a whole lot of those countries grew up taking advantage of mechanisms and data that they seek to exclude others from having by use of their market power and restrictive contracts, and this should be prevented.

E.g. back to Meta, etc: they scraped everything, everywhere for a long time, and it was a big factor that lead to their rise. Now they seek to control all the data in their fiefdom, and use the power of the legal system to enforce EULAs to prevent others from doing the same.

Why? Because economic entities with market power underproduce, overcharge, and fail to innovate and meet their customers' needs. They cause deadweight losses through their inefficiencies. And an excess of concentrated power is just plain scary, whether an individual, a corporation, or a government wields it.

Of course, reducing some of the edge of market power at scale will result in a smaller maximum company size.

A) I'm flexible on the exact numbers here, but a starting point for discussion could be a company with more than 20% market share in a total market above 1% GDP. I admit that finding an effective standard that can withstand legal scrutiny is the hard part here, and we should work on improving it once we agree that megacorporations should be destroyed. I am still looking for a good way to cover vertical integration and other multi-market failure cases, for example.

- Small business should be the driving force in the economy. They are the wellspring of competition and the bastion of the middle class.

- Megacorporations seek to destroy the ability for small businesses to compete with them, leaving buyout or vassalage as their only possible endgame. This shuts down true competitive threats to the megacorporations' dominance. They are trying to pull up the ladder behind them.

- A company should not be so large it can afford to ignore its customers.

- A company should not be so large that it can treat regulatory fines as merely a cost of doing business.

- A company should not be so large that it gets to write the laws and regulations.

- The Monopoly standard is not strict enough. Cartel-like oligopolies cooperate on the important political issues while maintaining a facade of competition.

- Our political systems are not equipped to handle the centralization of such large amounts of wealth. While the economy may not be a zero-sum game, power is, and power follows money.

- ADDED: A company must not be too big to fail.

- ANOTHER: A company should not be so large it can use loss-leaders to bully its way into other markets.

Those criteria seem pretty good. All those companies should be broken up and required to make certain divestitures until they no longer to-big-to-fail, oligarchical, anti-competitive etc.

They are banned, in China.

yeah can’t get too many people working on the same thing or creating value, that’d be bad and we’d have to destroy it

Pretty much every country where it is economically viable to build an alternative has an alternative to these platforms that they aggressively push on their citizens.

Europe may be an exception, but that is what you get when the US is your suzerain.

> but that is what you get when the US is your suzerain.

Hopefully the next 4 years help change that.

China bans them. Europe, Canada and Australia are constantly trying to regulate the media parts of the business. If they had the capacity to built an alternative (like china) a ban or forced divestiture doesn’t seem that out there.

Every country on earth "has the capacity" to build alternative social networks. They just don't because the need hasn't become obvious enough yet.

The set of countries that don't actively object to that is a strict subset of the countries the TikTok bill would have allowed TikTok to continue operating from if ownership had been passed to them.

This was a bill only against China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran. None of whom allow particularly free access to the internet.

For example the Facebook article on "Censorship of Facebook" lists all of those countries as well as Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and Uganda as the only countries that "continually ban access" to facebook.

The countries targeted by this law (China, North Korea, Iran, Russia) generally do have objections to their citizens using US services.

Not China though.

I would not be surprised if governments pushing back against all foreign social media is a major theme of the decade. America is basically saying to the world right now foreign social media companies are a major risk. The global reach of America's social media companies could be coming to an end.

They’re only saying this specific one is and how long did it take for that to pass through legislature and courts?

It’s not always a slippery slope. And China's use of soft power via strict governmental control of its corporations isn’t an imaginary boogeyman.

No, they set up a framework where any other such case can be easily included in the ban. The executive order doesn't even name TikTok, except when referring to now-revoked previous things it revoked.

> (d) The Secretary of Commerce shall evaluate on a continuing basis trans- actions involving connected software applications that may pose an undue risk of sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, produc- tion, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology or services in the United States; pose an undue risk of catastrophic effects on the security or resiliency of the critical infra- structure or digital economy of the United States; or otherwise pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons. Based on the evaluation, the Secretary of Commerce shall take appropriate action in accordance with Executive Order 13873 and its implementing regulations.

Twitter/X had a hard time in Brazil recently and was temporarily banned. Meta is now feeling more intense pushback from Brazil's judiciary power.

> And yet many countries have no objection with letting their citizens use US FAANG services?

You're talking out of ignorance. The European Commission has been putting together initiatives to allow European cloud providers to emerge as credible alternatives to the FANGs in terms of providing infrastructure.

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...

Not that it's the only factor, but don't forget that for many countries, seemingly going "against" the US is very hard. Whoever feels like the US never puts pressure on western countries is probably a US citizen.

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