> It was an ultimatum of "put our users' data in our servers or have your entire business crippled", And the rest of FAANG chose option B, because violating us

> It was an ultimatum of "put our users' data in our servers or have your entire business crippled", And the rest of FAANG chose option B, because violating user trust in the way China wanted was absolutely insane. The only company forced into kissing the boot was Apple. > which might have also been illegal to do in the U.S. since it would've violated shareholder trust to destroy possibly years of efficiency Yeah, I don't think any jury would indict Apple for leaving China. It was a controversial decision when they decided to bend the knee, and shareholders are breathing a sigh of relief with Apple's iPhone assembly experiments in other countries. Shareholders want to stay in China for the cheap labor - that's it. Once they can exploit workers with similar efficiency elsewhere, China will be unnecessary. > So while the US has the potential to follow in China's footsteps The way I see things, China is following in the US' footsteps. They know everything we manufacture is backdoored, so they have their own companies with their own government backdoors. They make huge pushes to remove American systems from their infrastructure like we do with them, and treat every American-made piece of technology as if it was a direct line to Langley. They subjugate services that operate in the mainland, or ban them entirely. Mimicking China's stranglehold over tech companies would just resemble closing the loop of CIA employees who are on-call at FAANG. Their entire strategy here is embarrassingly simple, accelerated by authoritarianism and abetted by capitalist interests. The veneer of "political stability" is enough to make me laugh, even as an apologist for the American government.