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I see no reason to give China access to Western markets if we cant do the same with our IT companies.
by mathverse 4y ago
I see no reason to give China access to Western markets if we cant do the same with our IT companies.
- jiggawatts 4y agoPeople don't realise how ridiculously asymmetric the relationship between China and the rest of the world is. Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try. I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I probably would not visit because they're anti... everything. Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti everything I hold dear. But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no problems. China? Hah... no. That would require paperwork, in person, in chinese, paid for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank. I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a police station to get an authorisation number, which I would then have to display on every page of that web server. Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country they please. Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws to publish anything at all on that side of the Great Firewall.
- seydor 4y agoIn return for that china allowed the world to export its pollution and manufacturing . Those are trade-offs
- stanislavb 4y agoThis! Until China is fully open and non-totalitarian, they don't have any right to complain.
- twelve40 4y agoit is not about them, its about why should there be some entity out there that censors my information and decides what I'm allowed to see and what I'm not allowed to see? why does the government here feel like it must interfere with me, censor and babysit me?
- vineyardmike 4y agoThe proposed ban on TikTok is not about you. No one cares to babysit you. They want to punish china for the perceived injustice (and security risk). China has an asymmetric market, and it’s bad for US businesses but good for Chinese businesses. The US wants to send a message to china that it can also punish businesses that it doesn’t like.
- twelve40 4y agoyeah but it amounts to straight up censorship. Someone in the government decides what is safe for the citizens to see. How do you even ban it, does the US have mechanisms in place to enforce a government ban on a web site/app?
- vineyardmike 4y agoIt’s incidental censoring. The content can and will move elsewhere, so it’s not preventing speech just limiting where it can go. Yes the US has a mechanism to ban a company and that should apply to that company’s app. It’s just trade restrictions like with Huawei. Banning a website will be harder, but by banning advertisers from paying for ads it’ll destroy the profitability of serving American consumers.
- petronio 4y agoApart from what vineyardmike mentioned, there's a few additional levers, like having the app removed from app stores. I don't know what the current state of their traffic and DNS filtering capabilities, but if they really wanted to go nuclear they have jurisdiction over the com TLD. Wouldn't be the first time they've seized a domain on "national security, etc." grounds.
- RobotToaster 4y agoYou can do all that easily in HKSAR, but you're mostly correct about the mainland. (technically you don't need a Chinese ID, just a permanent residence)
- drak0n1c 4y agoWhen President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match or reach a fraction of China’s (and hopefully would enable future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden has maintained that course and the public has come around to more hawkish policy. Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.
- yamtaddle 4y agoPushing back on China, economically, has been broadly popular for a long damn time. It's just unpopular-among-actual-voters neoliberal trade policy, which has been the consensus policy of both major parties for decades, that's kept us from doing it—Trump, very notably, was the first major party Presidential candidate to run since probably some time in the '80s, on a platform with such a strong anti-neoliberal stance. The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump were like "fucking good, more of this please". I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases—my "oh no, this is gonna be really bad for the health of our democracy" moment was when he made his "2nd amendment people" remark and suffered no meaningful consequences, back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases like that, where the negative media response was sharply at odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.
- ehhthing 4y agoFunnily enough, spinning a cloud VM is quite easy actually. You can do it in seconds on Alibaba Cloud. Getting port 80 unblocked on the other hand... Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so. How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor. Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you. Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...
- roenxi 4y agoI can think of one - banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes. Just because the CCP doesn't want Chinese people to use the best available products is no reason to deny them to Americans. Americans should have access to the best products that they can afford. This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic. That being said, there is always an argument for banning foreign social media companies (really all media companies) from making commercial profits in other countries. The political and military risks are significant.
- r-w 4y agoWhen the product is commercializing and manipulating its users, though, things aren’t so clear. Is it a gift, or a Trojan horse? That’s the open question here, regardless of Congress’s demagogic motives.
- int_19h 4y agoLet the government publish studies proving that it is a Trojan horse. And then let the users decide if the proof is convincing.
- walkhour 4y ago> banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes. TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case. > This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic. Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
- t-writescode 4y agoTikTok is superior in rapidly distributing relatively niche information to enormous quantities of interested parties. I believe the current recommended example is "Go look up France on TikTok vs look up France on Instagram" Addendum: TikTok is also superior at dynamically generating an advertisable collective that are specifically interested and desiring of the ads they're given. Five million small businesses found their place on TikTok entirely because they found their 2000-person size niche that would be interested in buying their product, and even encouraged them to buy it.
- mistermann 4y agoI agree with the sentiment, but in this case the value TikTok provides for free speech outweighs China's unfair trade policies, which have been this way for a couple decades.
- Miner49er 4y agoBecause American citizens (are supposed to) have rights that Chinese citizens don't. The first amendment covers access to information. Banning TikTok is a violation of all Americans' first amendment rights.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoBanning TikTok even runs counter to the value we hear used to justify the first amendment: diversity of thought and discourse is inherently good; it allows people to decide for themselves using their faculties of rationality. We even have Benjamin Franklin and polemic if not mis-attributed Voltaire quotes[1] used to inspire a basis for free speech. Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value. To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could. 1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
- unethical_ban 4y agoCome on. I agree that banning TikTok on the grounds of its algorithm being controlled by China is dubious. After all, it is content, it is information, and it is up to an open society to call out the fact that social media is trash, that Chinese social media is anti-American disinformation poison. However, it is reasonable to believe tiktok's recommendations are crafted to harm American intellect, prey on vanity to reward shallow behavior, and gather large scale behavioral and physical activity (site tracking, habits, physical location, items in homes, etc) for the purposes of the Chinese government. If it is recognized as a spy tool of a hostile government, why permit it?
- epups 4y agoWould you say the same of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and defend the right of the rest if the world to ban them?
- scotuswroteus 4y agoAs an American, I don't feel any belonging to any collective that includes me when it says "we" and expresses itself this way
- BlackjackCF 4y agoExactly this. This is just a response to what China’s already done with non-Chinese companies for decades.
- esrh 4y agoIt's to be freer than china
- josephcsible 4y agoAmerica should unconditionally extend freedom to its own citizens, but not to agents of foreign governments that don't reciprocate in kind.
- cvalka 4y agoYou're restricting the rights of the American citizens!
- albertopv 4y ago"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them"
- saagarjha 4y agoWhy flag intolerance selectively?
- albertopv 4y agoChina is an existential threat for western block. She is buying almost all mines of raw materials needed for batteries and green economy, generally speaking, she's going to buy russian gas at great discount, she's undermining western established institutions. Maybe it's a good thing for the world to be more balanced towards a so big autocracy, it seems majority of people don't care about democracy. But I'm egoist, I live in the west and I care about the future of my country.
- dpkirchner 4y agoI've been hearing this for years, possibly decades. If China is such an existential threat, why didn't we (the wealthiest country in the world) buy up those mines ourselves? Why is TikTok of all things where we're making our stand? I don't buy it.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThat's fine but domestic businesses should be held to the same standard. China doesn't allow TikTok BS to be disseminated in their territory. The same reasoning should apply to FB and Twitter.
- chinathrow 4y agoWhat is China aiming for? Dumbing down hundreds of millions of westerners while their own population only sees "better" content?
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoRevenge for the opium wars.
- Tade0 4y agoThey're already having that: https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
- HWR_14 4y agoI thought the opium wars were fought by the British after US independence
- capableweb 4y agoExactly the same arguments against TikTok can be made for basically any social media, "dumbing down the population". Only difference is what country's laws the company is regulated under, which hardly makes one better than the other.
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- shenman 4y agoIs that a red herring? The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban. The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.