8 ms·

Aren't US going to ban TikTok?(i heard something like this previous week) If US banned TikTok, willn't that decision affect TikTok? (like it affected Huawei)

yellow_postit 6y ago
Part of this commitment may be to incent Google to lobby on behalf of TikTok against a ban.
- jsnell 6y ago
  That seems unlikely, given the readable part of the article says that this happened in "May 2019".
  - ninjaturtlez 6y ago
    You're right, they've been at it for a year already. Probably why the app isn't banned yet
stu2b50 6y ago
At some point people in the administration talked about potentially doing something to that effect. I highly doubt it will ever materialize.
enitihas 6y ago
Unlike Huawei, TikTok doesn't have critical production dependency on the US (specialized semiconductors). Huawei also won't have been too impacted if just their imports were blocked in the US. TikTok will be hurt without US customers, but they are too big in China that they will easily survive. And will easily compete worldwide against any US company.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Even Huawei functionally has an advanced enough node at SMIC (14nm-ish) to fulfill their core industry.
  - kyboren 6y ago
    For their handset SoCs, sure. But the real prize appears to be the base station market. As I understand it, Huawei's base stations are critically dependent upon Xilinx FPGAs. With those no longer available to them, Huawei is in a difficult position. They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.). I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure. 14nm is already competitive with Xilinx FPGAs in terms of efficiency. All Huawei has to do is build ASICs instead, and they should keep or improve their performance. Xilinx is on a mix of 20nm and 16nm, by the way. The billions of dollars that the Chinese Government will invest in order to compensate for the sanctions might have the unintended side effects of actually making performance of Huawei gear more efficient. The jump from FPGA to ASIC is pretty big as far as efficiency, and being able to have it financed for free to defend against US sanctions is pretty sweet. They also happen to have stockpiled enough FPGAs to buy time for the transition.
      - kyboren 6y ago
        They are not currently using ASICs, so ASICs are presumably not a good fit for the application. Maybe the NRE costs are too excessive given the very small volume, flexibility/updateability is essential, TTM is too long, something else, or some combination of the above. Any way you slice it, being cut off from Xilinx is going to cost Huawei. Building a competitive ASIC will also be significantly more challenging now that Huawei has been cut off from all the major EDA companies. Finally, I assume that Xilinx is well into development on future product lines based on newer processes. It would be extremely difficult for Huawei to bootstrap their way to commercially competitive FPGAs.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nilkn 6y ago
  The reasons I'd seen for considering a US ban on TikTok were all security related (i.e., various claims to the effect of TikTok collecting data on US citizens for usage by the CCP). Those reasons, if valid, would seem to remain valid even in the face of your points here.
  - itake 6y ago
    And controlling the content narrative. E.g. pro-china content could be promoted directly to young Americans.
  - zjaffee 6y ago
    Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.
    - nilkn 6y ago
      I don't know if they're valid. I think my point is structured in such a way that it doesn't matter in this context: those concerns, if they are or were ever valid, are not rendered invalid by the points that the above commenter was making. I don't believe I have the background to comment meaningfully on whether TikTok is an actual security threat to US citizens or whether the US government would be hypocritical in banning TikTok for such a reason. The question of hypocrisy also seems like a separate one to me (i.e., should one not do the correct thing because it would be seen as hypocritical by some?).
    - _prototype_ 6y ago
      Would you rather a country that many people around the world wants to migrate to in order to pursue their dreams spying on you (USA), or a country where people are put in concentration camps (China and the Uyghurs) spying on you? I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils. I see your argument a lot and its quite stupid.
      - patrickaljord 6y ago
ralph84 6y ago
If the US banned American companies from selling to ByteDance/TikTok, then yes, ByteDance would have to move to a non-US cloud like Alibaba.
syshum 6y ago
>>If US banned TikTok Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it At most they could bar employees of the federal government (and its contractors) from using it, which given the federal government is one of the largest would have a large impact. Even that limited action however would be met with a large legal challenge and would have a good chance of failure for anything that is not a Government Computer / Phone / Network
- axlee 6y ago
  The US bans french cheeses and Kinder eggs, I am pretty sure they can ban a chinese spyware.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  > Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it "National Security"
- parliament32 6y ago
  All they need to do is poke the Play Store / App Store the right way and, poof, it's gone. They don't need to legally ban it, just send a strongly worded letter.
  - syshum 6y ago
    Well given that Google is anti-trump I am sure they would not simply do what Trump says. Now if Biden was elected I am sure it would be different
- ralph84 6y ago
  > our constitution would forbid it [Citation needed] On the contrary, the US constitution specifically permits regulation of international trade as an enumerated power. All the US government needs to do is put ByteDance on the same entity list they put ZTE and Huawei on and Apple and Google would have no choice but to pull TikTok from their app stores.

yellow_postit 6y ago

Part of this commitment may be to incent Google to lobby on behalf of TikTok against a ban.

jsnell 6y ago
That seems unlikely, given the readable part of the article says that this happened in "May 2019".
- ninjaturtlez 6y ago
  You're right, they've been at it for a year already. Probably why the app isn't banned yet

stu2b50 6y ago

At some point people in the administration talked about potentially doing something to that effect. I highly doubt it will ever materialize.

enitihas 6y ago

Unlike Huawei, TikTok doesn't have critical production dependency on the US (specialized semiconductors). Huawei also won't have been too impacted if just their imports were blocked in the US. TikTok will be hurt without US customers, but they are too big in China that they will easily survive. And will easily compete worldwide against any US company.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Even Huawei functionally has an advanced enough node at SMIC (14nm-ish) to fulfill their core industry.
- kyboren 6y ago
  For their handset SoCs, sure. But the real prize appears to be the base station market. As I understand it, Huawei's base stations are critically dependent upon Xilinx FPGAs. With those no longer available to them, Huawei is in a difficult position. They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.). I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. 14nm is already competitive with Xilinx FPGAs in terms of efficiency. All Huawei has to do is build ASICs instead, and they should keep or improve their performance. Xilinx is on a mix of 20nm and 16nm, by the way. The billions of dollars that the Chinese Government will invest in order to compensate for the sanctions might have the unintended side effects of actually making performance of Huawei gear more efficient. The jump from FPGA to ASIC is pretty big as far as efficiency, and being able to have it financed for free to defend against US sanctions is pretty sweet. They also happen to have stockpiled enough FPGAs to buy time for the transition.
    - kyboren 6y ago
      They are not currently using ASICs, so ASICs are presumably not a good fit for the application. Maybe the NRE costs are too excessive given the very small volume, flexibility/updateability is essential, TTM is too long, something else, or some combination of the above. Any way you slice it, being cut off from Xilinx is going to cost Huawei. Building a competitive ASIC will also be significantly more challenging now that Huawei has been cut off from all the major EDA companies. Finally, I assume that Xilinx is well into development on future product lines based on newer processes. It would be extremely difficult for Huawei to bootstrap their way to commercially competitive FPGAs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nilkn 6y ago
The reasons I'd seen for considering a US ban on TikTok were all security related (i.e., various claims to the effect of TikTok collecting data on US citizens for usage by the CCP). Those reasons, if valid, would seem to remain valid even in the face of your points here.
- itake 6y ago
  And controlling the content narrative. E.g. pro-china content could be promoted directly to young Americans.
- zjaffee 6y ago
  Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.
  - nilkn 6y ago
    I don't know if they're valid. I think my point is structured in such a way that it doesn't matter in this context: those concerns, if they are or were ever valid, are not rendered invalid by the points that the above commenter was making. I don't believe I have the background to comment meaningfully on whether TikTok is an actual security threat to US citizens or whether the US government would be hypocritical in banning TikTok for such a reason. The question of hypocrisy also seems like a separate one to me (i.e., should one not do the correct thing because it would be seen as hypocritical by some?).
  - _prototype_ 6y ago
    Would you rather a country that many people around the world wants to migrate to in order to pursue their dreams spying on you (USA), or a country where people are put in concentration camps (China and the Uyghurs) spying on you? I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils. I see your argument a lot and its quite stupid.
    - patrickaljord 6y ago

ralph84 6y ago

If the US banned American companies from selling to ByteDance/TikTok, then yes, ByteDance would have to move to a non-US cloud like Alibaba.

syshum 6y ago

>>If US banned TikTok Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it At most they could bar employees of the federal government (and its contractors) from using it, which given the federal government is one of the largest would have a large impact. Even that limited action however would be met with a large legal challenge and would have a good chance of failure for anything that is not a Government Computer / Phone / Network

axlee 6y ago
The US bans french cheeses and Kinder eggs, I am pretty sure they can ban a chinese spyware.
arrosenberg 6y ago
> Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it "National Security"
parliament32 6y ago
All they need to do is poke the Play Store / App Store the right way and, poof, it's gone. They don't need to legally ban it, just send a strongly worded letter.
- syshum 6y ago
  Well given that Google is anti-trump I am sure they would not simply do what Trump says. Now if Biden was elected I am sure it would be different
ralph84 6y ago
> our constitution would forbid it [Citation needed] On the contrary, the US constitution specifically permits regulation of international trade as an enumerated power. All the US government needs to do is put ByteDance on the same entity list they put ZTE and Huawei on and Apple and Google would have no choice but to pull TikTok from their app stores.