4 ms·

I'm highly skeptical of that prediction. The EU are hardly slouches with respect to anti-monopoly actions. Chinese and Russian companies are subject to intense

I'm highly skeptical of that prediction. The EU are hardly slouches with respect to anti-monopoly actions. Chinese and Russian companies are subject to intense fear-mongering (not that every criticism is invalid) and are unlikely to take the place of FAANG. And I don't foresee other Asian, African, Middle-Eastern, or companies from UK or the Americas achieving huge monopolies before actions could be taken against them.

yowlingcat 5y ago
What do you think about ByteDance? The crown jewel of social media no longer belongs to the US.
- majormajor 5y ago
  TikTok is a curious one. The Chinese service appears to be a completely separate content silo. And Musical.ly grew in the US without needing antitrust action against FB or Snap or anyone else, in the same way that those companies displaced others. The bar to entry to that marketplace is already low, I don't think it's really relevant to discussions around Amazon or Google or MS or even Apple.
  - yowlingcat 5y ago
    Great points. Social media is a different beast compared to Amazon/MS/Apple but seeing a CN company crack the US advertising duopoly (F/G) is interesting. And I do wonder how much of that pertains to the Musical.ly acquisition. Now, I'm trying to think about the discussion as it pertains to the AAM slice of GAFAM and the conversation gets more interesting for me there. I can think of substitutes for Apple (Huawei) and Amazon (Alibaba) with US market penetration, but I can't think of any for M. I can think of a couple reasons why off the top of my head but I'm curious as to what you think.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Are you referring to TikTok as the crown jewel? I don't see how that description fits. Regardless: * Where's the monopoly? TikTok is one slice of the social media pie, unlike Facebook's ownership of Whatsapp/Messenger, Facebook.com, Instagram (with its Snapchat lite features). * What are ByteDance doing with TikTok that's different from what US companies do with their social network data? e.g., Twitter. As a side-note one could argue Twitter aqui-killed Vine, setting the stage for TikTok. * If desired, couldn't the Biden administration immediately return to the Trump-era policy of requiring ByteDance to sell a substantial part of their TikTok business to a US company? Which is a remedy that US companies complain about when China does it. I see far fewer problems with TikTok's associations with China than I do with Facebook's ownership of many slices of the social media pie, never mind that the US has many 3-letter agencies hoovering up data from US owned social media networks, even about US citizens (at the very least all it takes is an interaction with a non-US account for the US account data to be considered fair game).
zsz 5y ago
Chinese entities seem to be treated like a special case / emerging market/industry, by even the most senior E.U. member states. This is in contrast to the U.S. / U.S. entities, which are viewed / treated as a mature (i.e. low/no-growth) market. The linear outcome of this ongoing state of informal submission is a rise in effronteries / audacious behavior at the official, international level, such as https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wins-south-china-sea-case-against-china https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wi... "China has said it will not accept a ruling against it in a key international legal case over strategic reefs and atolls that Beijing claims would give it control over disputed waters of the South China Sea. The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague came down overwhelmingly in favour of claims by the Philippines and is likely to increase global diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in the area. By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling from the permanent court of arbitration effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing “nine-dash” line that stretches deep into the South China Sea." Five years later, it appears the case was quietly forgotten by all. * * * Or how about this, more recently: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-china/outraged-french-lawmakers-demand-answers-on-fake-chinese-embassy-accusations-idUSKCN21X30C https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france... "... members of the French Senate demanded answers at a hearing with the foreign minister as to why an article they said was fake and cast them in a bad light was still up on the Chinese embassy website [...] In the post, an unnamed diplomat suggests that careworkers in Western nursing homes - using the French term EHPAD - had abandoned their jobs, leaving residents to die."
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Well, US official policy is that they do not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, or any other international court, over US citizens or the US state. This has been seen with a few trials for war crimes, most notably the trial they lost (and ignored) for mining Nicaragua's ports, a clear violation of the Geneva convention, an explicit war crime. As an EU citizen, whether I'm kowtowing to Chinese or US imperialism is not all that different. Sure, I'd much rather live in the US than China, but in recent history, US influence outside their borders has been much, much worse for those under their heel than has Chinese influence.
username90 5y ago
EU doesn't tend to break up big companies though, just regulate and negotiate with them.
- dundarious 5y ago
  The point is that EU regulations may prevent the creation of monopolies in the first place, so EU countries are unlikely to be a source of alternative monopolies to the existing US ones. So there's cause to think it unlikely that we'd be trading a "devil we know" that is at least partly accountable to US institutions, for a "devil we don't" that is less/not accountable.

yowlingcat 5y ago

What do you think about ByteDance? The crown jewel of social media no longer belongs to the US.

majormajor 5y ago
TikTok is a curious one. The Chinese service appears to be a completely separate content silo. And Musical.ly grew in the US without needing antitrust action against FB or Snap or anyone else, in the same way that those companies displaced others. The bar to entry to that marketplace is already low, I don't think it's really relevant to discussions around Amazon or Google or MS or even Apple.
- yowlingcat 5y ago
  Great points. Social media is a different beast compared to Amazon/MS/Apple but seeing a CN company crack the US advertising duopoly (F/G) is interesting. And I do wonder how much of that pertains to the Musical.ly acquisition. Now, I'm trying to think about the discussion as it pertains to the AAM slice of GAFAM and the conversation gets more interesting for me there. I can think of substitutes for Apple (Huawei) and Amazon (Alibaba) with US market penetration, but I can't think of any for M. I can think of a couple reasons why off the top of my head but I'm curious as to what you think.
dundarious 5y ago
Are you referring to TikTok as the crown jewel? I don't see how that description fits. Regardless: * Where's the monopoly? TikTok is one slice of the social media pie, unlike Facebook's ownership of Whatsapp/Messenger, Facebook.com, Instagram (with its Snapchat lite features). * What are ByteDance doing with TikTok that's different from what US companies do with their social network data? e.g., Twitter. As a side-note one could argue Twitter aqui-killed Vine, setting the stage for TikTok. * If desired, couldn't the Biden administration immediately return to the Trump-era policy of requiring ByteDance to sell a substantial part of their TikTok business to a US company? Which is a remedy that US companies complain about when China does it. I see far fewer problems with TikTok's associations with China than I do with Facebook's ownership of many slices of the social media pie, never mind that the US has many 3-letter agencies hoovering up data from US owned social media networks, even about US citizens (at the very least all it takes is an interaction with a non-US account for the US account data to be considered fair game).

zsz 5y ago

Chinese entities seem to be treated like a special case / emerging market/industry, by even the most senior E.U. member states. This is in contrast to the U.S. / U.S. entities, which are viewed / treated as a mature (i.e. low/no-growth) market. The linear outcome of this ongoing state of informal submission is a rise in effronteries / audacious behavior at the official, international level, such as https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wins-south-china-sea-case-against-china https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wi... "China has said it will not accept a ruling against it in a key international legal case over strategic reefs and atolls that Beijing claims would give it control over disputed waters of the South China Sea. The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague came down overwhelmingly in favour of claims by the Philippines and is likely to increase global diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in the area. By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling from the permanent court of arbitration effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing “nine-dash” line that stretches deep into the South China Sea." Five years later, it appears the case was quietly forgotten by all. * * * Or how about this, more recently: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-china/outraged-french-lawmakers-demand-answers-on-fake-chinese-embassy-accusations-idUSKCN21X30C https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france... "... members of the French Senate demanded answers at a hearing with the foreign minister as to why an article they said was fake and cast them in a bad light was still up on the Chinese embassy website [...] In the post, an unnamed diplomat suggests that careworkers in Western nursing homes - using the French term EHPAD - had abandoned their jobs, leaving residents to die."

tsimionescu 5y ago
Well, US official policy is that they do not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, or any other international court, over US citizens or the US state. This has been seen with a few trials for war crimes, most notably the trial they lost (and ignored) for mining Nicaragua's ports, a clear violation of the Geneva convention, an explicit war crime. As an EU citizen, whether I'm kowtowing to Chinese or US imperialism is not all that different. Sure, I'd much rather live in the US than China, but in recent history, US influence outside their borders has been much, much worse for those under their heel than has Chinese influence.

username90 5y ago

EU doesn't tend to break up big companies though, just regulate and negotiate with them.

dundarious 5y ago
The point is that EU regulations may prevent the creation of monopolies in the first place, so EU countries are unlikely to be a source of alternative monopolies to the existing US ones. So there's cause to think it unlikely that we'd be trading a "devil we know" that is at least partly accountable to US institutions, for a "devil we don't" that is less/not accountable.