4 ms·

Does China allow Facebook to work in China?

henry2023 2y ago
If you’re going to base the actions of the US on grounds of what a country run by the communist party does. Then, are we really capitalists?
- hoseja 2y ago
  Then clearly just banning a propaganda outlet is the smallest bit of warfare that should be waged against the communist country. If China is communist, TikTok is an arm of the CCP. If China is capitalist, it's perfectly fine to retaliate against them blocking western companies from operating within their borders.
jpgvm 2y ago
Technically yes. Google also. The caveat being they expect data and servers etc to be present within China and unlike the EU don't allow data to leave China. The penalties are also much much higher. There are also rules around applying censorship and other requirements, not dissimilar from operating in Thailand, Vietnam, India and probably other markets but those are the 3 I'm very familiar with. Google previously was happy enough with this arrangement but eventually pulled out. They had very poor market penetration, Baidu then (and now) enjoys a near monopoly on search similar to Google in the US. I imagine that was the key reason rather than the rules themselves as they operate in other very restrictive markets without complaint. Facebook would have an awful time trying to compete in China tbh. The market is just way too competitive with way too many absolutely cutthroat market participants, completely unlike the US market which was pretty much stagnant before TikTok showed up. These companies don't enter China for the same reason why many companies don't. Domestic competition there is just too damn tough. If your market isn't already in race to the bottom stage in China it always descends into it pretty quickly because of the rate people clone and adopt similar ideas. If you don't have an unfair advantage you need to be very innovative to stay ahead.
- Jensson 2y ago
  The other countries you mentioned doesn't have anything like the great firewall of China. Google etc failed in China because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits, that isn't the case in the other countries you talked about. In order to compete at all they would need to redo their algorithm and service from the ground up to fit the Chinese internet because they ban so much that you can't reuse what you did for the rest. For example, the only countries that bans the entirety of Wikipedia is China and Myanmar, and China has done that much longer. The scale and severity of Chinas censorship is on a whole different level from any other country. Russia censors a few wikipedia pages, China just bans the entire thing, those two are nowhere close and one is much harder to deal with. The other countries that banned wikipedia did so for only a limited period of time or just a small subset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
  - jpgvm 2y ago
    > because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits You mean non-Chinese content? Chinese users aren't interested in non-Chinese content by and large. English literacy is better now than it was when Google pulled out and it's still pretty bad. Dealing with the censorship is trivial. The problem was they couldn't compete on merits and got absolutely dunked by Baidu on search and maps (though there is a ton of competition in maps these days, namely Amap and Gaode Map but it was true when Google pulled out). Primarily because of localisation (because it's natively Chinese) and also because Baidu looks and works like the rest of the Chinese web. For similar reasons Yahoo is still huge in Japan. It looks and feels Japanese. Google does not. I really reject the idea that Google failed because of censorship. All of their Chinese competitors had the same restrictions and came out on top is all.
haebom 2y ago
Even if this is reciprocity, it doesn't make sense. If this is the way it is, then services originating from other countries, not just China, should be treated the same way.

henry2023 2y ago

If you’re going to base the actions of the US on grounds of what a country run by the communist party does. Then, are we really capitalists?

hoseja 2y ago
Then clearly just banning a propaganda outlet is the smallest bit of warfare that should be waged against the communist country. If China is communist, TikTok is an arm of the CCP. If China is capitalist, it's perfectly fine to retaliate against them blocking western companies from operating within their borders.

jpgvm 2y ago

Technically yes. Google also. The caveat being they expect data and servers etc to be present within China and unlike the EU don't allow data to leave China. The penalties are also much much higher. There are also rules around applying censorship and other requirements, not dissimilar from operating in Thailand, Vietnam, India and probably other markets but those are the 3 I'm very familiar with. Google previously was happy enough with this arrangement but eventually pulled out. They had very poor market penetration, Baidu then (and now) enjoys a near monopoly on search similar to Google in the US. I imagine that was the key reason rather than the rules themselves as they operate in other very restrictive markets without complaint. Facebook would have an awful time trying to compete in China tbh. The market is just way too competitive with way too many absolutely cutthroat market participants, completely unlike the US market which was pretty much stagnant before TikTok showed up. These companies don't enter China for the same reason why many companies don't. Domestic competition there is just too damn tough. If your market isn't already in race to the bottom stage in China it always descends into it pretty quickly because of the rate people clone and adopt similar ideas. If you don't have an unfair advantage you need to be very innovative to stay ahead.

Jensson 2y ago
The other countries you mentioned doesn't have anything like the great firewall of China. Google etc failed in China because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits, that isn't the case in the other countries you talked about. In order to compete at all they would need to redo their algorithm and service from the ground up to fit the Chinese internet because they ban so much that you can't reuse what you did for the rest. For example, the only countries that bans the entirety of Wikipedia is China and Myanmar, and China has done that much longer. The scale and severity of Chinas censorship is on a whole different level from any other country. Russia censors a few wikipedia pages, China just bans the entire thing, those two are nowhere close and one is much harder to deal with. The other countries that banned wikipedia did so for only a limited period of time or just a small subset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
- jpgvm 2y ago
  > because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits You mean non-Chinese content? Chinese users aren't interested in non-Chinese content by and large. English literacy is better now than it was when Google pulled out and it's still pretty bad. Dealing with the censorship is trivial. The problem was they couldn't compete on merits and got absolutely dunked by Baidu on search and maps (though there is a ton of competition in maps these days, namely Amap and Gaode Map but it was true when Google pulled out). Primarily because of localisation (because it's natively Chinese) and also because Baidu looks and works like the rest of the Chinese web. For similar reasons Yahoo is still huge in Japan. It looks and feels Japanese. Google does not. I really reject the idea that Google failed because of censorship. All of their Chinese competitors had the same restrictions and came out on top is all.

haebom 2y ago

Even if this is reciprocity, it doesn't make sense. If this is the way it is, then services originating from other countries, not just China, should be treated the same way.