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Comment by kvgr | Hacker News Reader

I am very pro free market, but Temu with data harvesting and selling illegal projects should be banned together with tiktok...

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As if Amazon don’t harvest data or have illegal products on its marketplace.

Amazon is better: it lobbies the EU. Why do you think Temu got fined ?

Doesn’t TEMU have CCP ties? Free market is for businesses and individuals and foreign govt entities should not unfairly benefit from a free market.

Ties as in pay tax to ccp. In China Temu is called pinduoduo (拼多多）and you can buy some wild stuff there, the regulation on mainland seems also pretty lax i mean.

Sorry, ties, as CCP party committees inside private firms. And in case of Temu, it also has a data-sharing agreement with People's Daily [1], a CCP controlled media group.

Just image having a mandatory political party inside every American corporation which the board has no control over.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/...

Every major PRoC company is required to have CCP ties; in addition to 'paying for facilitation' by local officials, a certain percentage of their employees must be CCP members.

All big companies in China are partially run by the CCP. Just how it works there.

Everybody in china that gets big has CCP ties. No way around it. Their car manufacturers are all propped up by government.

Dont US law makers have stocks in the companies they regulate? Without term limits? And Tesla even gets paid per car sold

America is not China, but how close is it getting?

Doesn't Bezos have Trump ties?

Amazon has acquired several companies that were originally funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital front. This is pretty common in the tech industry. Some major tech companies, such as Palantir, were In-Q-Tel startups, and some began as CIA projects before In-Q-Tel was founded (Oracle).

Last I heard the US govt is taking equity in some private industry too.

I’d start with the immense packaging waste and shameless overconsumption tricks that are banned in basically any other industry.

If you're "pro free market, but", you're not pro free market. That's fine, but you might want to reevaluate whether you're actually for it.

The US and China have standards as well and bodies to regulate them. Regulation vs Free Market debate isn't a binary issue and is a spectrum.

Free markets can have strong rules. No other than Adam Smith said they are needed.

I would even go further and say that the term really has to be almost "equal" - equal access, equal rules, equal legislation or the market isn't really free.

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