3 ms·

I wonder what is the largest legal entity a company like Apple or Google would be willing to flip the middle finger to and say "No, you are ridiculous, feel fre

by wyager 10y ago

I wonder what is the largest legal entity a company like Apple or Google would be willing to flip the middle finger to and say "No, you are ridiculous, feel free to ban us." At some point the demands just become so onerous that you either have to have separate SKUs for that legal region (extra expensive) or you have to put the same backdoors or restrictions in all your products (which makes the product inferior for customers outside of the legal region as well as within).

MBCook 10y ago
Apple clearly isn't going to, although at least they have a very pro-encryption stance that we already know China isn't keen on. Google already bowed years ago. They tried to stay out of China on principle with search didn't they? But in the end the market was just too big and they entered it. It's easy to take a principled stance against North Korea (where users don't get a choice) or a smaller country that's pretty big like even Iran if they wanted to. China is just too big for people to resist. At a certain point you're not going to grow much unless you go to China.
- wyager 10y ago
  Let's take the UK as an example. It's a medium-sized country, and no one has significant production there. Let's say the UK keeps passing insane backwards anti-privacy laws and at some point told Apple to drop the encryption from the iPhone. If Apple told them to pound sand and got banned from the UK, how much sales could they recoup if they kept Irish Apple stores extra well-stocked? If the response to Brazil's VAT is any example, thrifty entrepreneurs will do all the hard work of getting iPhones into the UK for a modest but very profitable overhead. A couple iPhones sold at 25% markup is more than enough to pay for a RyanAir round-trip and a week living in a cheap flat.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    Right. Either a county is so small it doesn't matter to sales, the grey market will fill it, or it's too big to ignore.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Google did back out of mainland China - they're only available in Hong Kong and lost 98% of their Chinese search market share because of it.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    Ah, thanks. That may be why I thought they were still on the mainland.

by wyager 10y ago

MBCook 10y ago

Apple clearly isn't going to, although at least they have a very pro-encryption stance that we already know China isn't keen on. Google already bowed years ago. They tried to stay out of China on principle with search didn't they? But in the end the market was just too big and they entered it. It's easy to take a principled stance against North Korea (where users don't get a choice) or a smaller country that's pretty big like even Iran if they wanted to. China is just too big for people to resist. At a certain point you're not going to grow much unless you go to China.

wyager 10y ago
Let's take the UK as an example. It's a medium-sized country, and no one has significant production there. Let's say the UK keeps passing insane backwards anti-privacy laws and at some point told Apple to drop the encryption from the iPhone. If Apple told them to pound sand and got banned from the UK, how much sales could they recoup if they kept Irish Apple stores extra well-stocked? If the response to Brazil's VAT is any example, thrifty entrepreneurs will do all the hard work of getting iPhones into the UK for a modest but very profitable overhead. A couple iPhones sold at 25% markup is more than enough to pay for a RyanAir round-trip and a week living in a cheap flat.
- MBCook 10y ago
  Right. Either a county is so small it doesn't matter to sales, the grey market will fill it, or it's too big to ignore.
bduerst 10y ago
Google did back out of mainland China - they're only available in Hong Kong and lost 98% of their Chinese search market share because of it.
- MBCook 10y ago
  Ah, thanks. That may be why I thought they were still on the mainland.