As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".
The law states that it cannot be owned by a Chinese company. So they could be sold to owners in almost any other country (the law explicitly lists China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia as being banned.
It’s interesting that they didn’t press the constitutionality of this. They fought over “free speech” where it’s more clear that this might be a bill of attainder or violation of the 14th amendment.
The court of appeals thought about it and decided it wasn't. Start on page 59 of their ruling [0].
They tried to appeal this to the supreme court, the supreme court declined to hear that part of the case. See bottom of page 34 on their petition for a writ of certiorari [1].
Ah, interesting! I just read the arguments from the supreme court case and not the whole history of the thing.
Reading the appeals court case, it appears that they did agree with it being a bill of attainder but decided the national security implications overruled it?
> it appears that they did agree with it being a bill of attainder but decided the national security implications overruled it?
Not how I would phrase it.
A bill of attainder is two things, it targets a specific person, and it punishes them.
They decide the bill definitely targets TikTok, which is possibly close enough to a "specific person", but it doesn't punish them. Thus it doesn't satisfy the second prong and they don't have to even finish deciding the first prong and left the "possibly" in there.
National security really comes in when trying to decide it was a punishment. It's not a traditional punishment, but one of the other ways they could decide it was a punishment would be if it didn't further any purposes but punishment, and in this case the purpose it happens to further was national security. As far as I can tell this analysis would be the exact same if congress passed the bill instead because they decided TikTok was harming schools ability to keep order. It just has to be any non-punitive purpose.
As a layman who has held to deal with the law on more than one occasion in the US, I would say forcing you to divest or shutdown is a punishment; ie, something a court usually tells you to do when you commit fraud, not a congressman. I'm 99% sure it wouldn't be hard to find at least one congressman on TV saying this law specifically exists to target TikTok and shut it down.
Yeah, so I'm just paraphrasing the appeals court ruling above.
There's no dispute that this bill exists specifically to target TikTok, and that it will likely result in at least a temporary shut down, permanent if they choose not to divest.
Apparently there are a bunch of prior rulings on the meaning of "bill of attainder" though which say that that isn't within the typical meaning of punishment as used to define it. To quote just a bit of the courts recitation of previous cases
> See BellSouth I, 144 F.3d at 65
(explaining that although “structural separation is hardly
costless, neither does it remotely approach the disabilities that
have traditionally marked forbidden attainders”); see also
Kaspersky Lab, Inc., 909 F.3d at 462–63 (comparing a law
requiring the Government to remove from its systems a Russia-based company’s software to the business regulations in the
BellSouth cases)
I'm not really knowledgeable about bills of attainder, but I think it might be useful to understand the distinction they're making to be one between "punishing" (the bill is, it hurts) and "punishment" (it's not because that's not the purpose, it's a side effect). There also appears to be a higher standard to qualify as punishing a corporate entity than an individual, which strikes me as a bit strange, but if I'm reading this right is settled law.
Of course if the app have done anything seriously illegal, it would not have been necessary to bring this law to ban it, because existing laws would have sufficed to do it.
Perhaps because US government wanted to do it despite TikTok not breaking any serious provisions of law this law has been made.
It feels like a sleight of hand from government to ban something that has broke no (serious) law (yet).
Did the SCOTUS go into the necessity of having this law to achieve what government wanted, if existing laws would have sufficed, provided that government met the standards of evidence/proof that those laws demanded.
If not, it is as if government wanted a 'short-cut' to a TikTok ban and SCOTUS approved it, rather than asking government to go the long way to it.
What this line argued in the Supreme Court in the oral arguments or in the opinion or in the lower court?
Obviously TT could not have brought this up, but the court could have brought it up while examining the government.
Both the Supreme Court and the appeals court went into quite a bit of detail as to the necessity of achieving what the government wanted, because it was relevant to justifying the impact on speech with regards to the first amendment.
Only the appeals court (and presumably the district court below them) heard arguments about it being a bill of attainder. The supreme court chose not to. With regards to being a bill of attainder the appeals court appears to be of the opinion that it is enough that it isn't a traditional punishment, and that the justification for it was something other than punishment, without analyzing whether the government had a legitimate interest in achieving their non-punishment purpose. Of course they had already found that they did have a legitimate interest because of the first amendment analysis, but I don't believe their opinion with regards to it not being a bill of attainder relied on that.
Did the supreme court examine government as to, if this was the only path available to achieve what it wanted?
Was it established that existing provisions of law is not sufficient to deal with the issue(perhaps not so easily as by fiat as in the new law, but requiring stricter standards of trial and evidence), necessitating this new law?
I don’t think it’s even close to a bill of attainder.
For one, it targets a class of companies operating from a collection of countries, not an individual person (and SCOTUS has never ruled on corporate personhood for the purposes of being a bill of attainder).
Secondly, the law in question does not declare a corporation guilty of any crime, it just offers restrictions on foreign control of certain businesses.
Third, the law targets non-American holdings, making it less likely that it could be considered a bill of attainder, since laws directly targeting foreign countries and agents thereof have been accepted in American law.
The whole idea of "corporate personhood" is a bit of a tortured way to describe Citizens United. It was introduced by the people (media and democrat lobbyists - the case was about a group that made a very negative documentary on Hillary Clinton) who had the most to lose from Citizens United and somehow stuck. There was never a ruling that corporations are people. The ruling in that case was more along the lines of "people don't lose fundamental rights by virtue of creating a corporation to exercise those rights." Calling that "corporate personhood" is a borderline misrepresentation, and leads to a lot of confusion when you think of other laws.
> people don't lose fundamental rights by virtue of creating a corporation to exercise those rights
No. That is even more manipulative way to put it. No one was "loosing fundamental rights", that part is a lie. What ruling did was to make corruption legal, if you create a corporation by virtue of corporate personhood.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental right. The people involved in Citizens United could have done exactly what they did as individuals with some contractual money sharing agreements, and both sides of the case acknowledged that. Signing one little extra piece of paper makes the whole thing illegal corruption?
The actual case of Citizens United had exceptionally bad facts for the camp that thinks it's a bad ruling. The DNC should never have pushed it as far as they did, because it came right back at them like a ton of bricks.
In contrast, bringing it back to this case, communication over the internet involves many different business agreements to get internet service, rent computing, etc. Those relationships are within the US's power to regulate and legislate, especially when they cross its borders.
While your words make sense to me, I cannot wrap my head around viewing it that way. It clearly makes them post facto guilty of the crime of owning the company (which is also not constitutional) and their punishment is either divestiture or shutdown -- which is an actual punishment given out by courts, not congressmen.
First, you could say something similar about many restrictions.
If there is one steel monopoly and you ban being a monopoly then we can apply the same logic you have there.
To be completely fair, the “illegal part” of being a monopoly is not generally in the existence of the monopoly itself, but in the monopolistic actions the company may take. However, those actions may be a fundamental part of the function of the company, and I’d argue that country of ownership is another property that should be eligible for restriction.
Second, and _far_ more importantly, it is not clear to me that it’s unconstitutional to make a law that a foreign company can’t operate a certain type of business in America.
I would argue this is a bad example because it will lead into a conversation about monopolies, which is off-topic.
Restrictions are fine, but they need to apply broadly -- this law was specifically targeted at a single US entity, owned by a foreign entity. To me, who has only coarsely read up on this due to his account being cut off because I originally signed up with a US phone number when I lived in the US; it seems as though a bunch of rich people got mad that someone else in another country was getting rich.
Keep in mind that I am just now even caring about this situation, so I'm coming in with fresh eyes and limited history. In any case...
> it is not clear to me that it’s unconstitutional to make a law that a foreign company can’t operate a certain type of business in America.
Of course they can. My only issue is that they are targeting a specific entity and punishing them for being owned by someone in another country, which seems unconstitutional. If they targeted all companies, big or small, it would be different. I may not like it, but it wouldn't be questionable.
> It’s interesting that they didn’t press the constitutionality of this. They fought over “free speech” where it’s more clear that this might be a bill of attainder or violation of the 14th amendment.
Please explain in layman's terms why do you believe the 14th amendment applies to the federal government rejecting a corporation owned and controlled by a totalitarian regime from operating within the US.
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I believe this applies to the USA as a whole as well, not just to states (Bolling v. Sharpe (1954) according to ChatGPT). One could argue the law is unconstitutional because it applies a punishment without due process.
> I believe this applies to the USA as a whole as well, not just to states (Bolling v. Sharpe (1954) according to ChatGPT). One could argue the law is unconstitutional because it applies a punishment without due process.
The 14th amendment applies to US citizens and persons. The law requires ByteDance to sell it's TikTok position. Who do you think is the US citizen or person in this case? China's CCP?
Pretty sure it was a US company... probably owned by Chinese, but I haven't been following it super closely and can't see how that matters any bit. It's sad how much the US has changed in the last decade since I became an expat almost a decade ago.
The company being targeted is ByteDance, not TikTok. The US government wants ByteDance to sell it's controlling position on TikTok to someone else, or else TikTok can no longer operate in the US. ByteDance is a Chinese company that is a de-facto shell corporation of China's CCP. For the 14th amendment to apply, you would need to argue that either a Chinese corporation or China's CCP would be US citizens.
I agree that the TikTok shutdown/sale/whatever-it-is is reasonable. But I also agree with the grandfather post that this standard should be applied to all social media.
A company that is under the sway of the CCP is an obvious first step, but just because twitter and facebook are American-owned doesn’t mean that geopolitical adversaries can’t use them to control the population too.
The thing is that those companies are very much under the power of American law, so we can (and have) taken less drastic (and less effective, imo) measures to restrict adversaries from using them for propaganda.
Amending the rules to prevent that kind of influence would be reasonable. He is saying thay specifically demanding a sale to the USA is the odd move; it wouldn’t even fix the issue of concentration of power, just shift it to someone else.
> He is saying thay specifically demanding a sale to the USA is the odd move; it wouldn’t even fix the issue of concentration of power, just shift it to someone else.
The problem is that right now the power is yielded by the CCP, which is clearly unacceptable. The problem is not TikTok per se but how a totalitarian regime that has a long track record of actively engaging in espionage and psyops against the US is controlling that platform. Forcing the CCP to sell it's position mitigates or eliminates the impact on the remaining shareholder's interests. The fact that the CCP opts for scorched earth tactics is already telling.
I don't think anyone is arguing that it is acceptable, but that the solution is at odds with a free market economy and values usually upheld by western democracies.
A company in Hungary starts manufacturing cars. They become wildly popular in the US. Everyone and their aunt is driving one. Then the US demands a sale for national security reasons. Does that sound reasonable? Instead, you address whatever the security gap is (data privacy, scanning for backdoors, data residency, etc) and enforce compliance.
In the case of social media, that would be mandatory tagging of paid content, advertisements, political ads (or prohibition of), along with measures to slow down/limit the dissemination of information so no single person can sway public opinion with the wave of a hand (cough cough X). In many countries, influencers are now subject to advertising rules, as it should be. At some point we'll need to get a grasp on how to do the same for news/opinion pieces.
Just dropping the whole thing into 'more reliable hands' without changing any of the rules of the game accomplishes very little.
It need not be someone in the US, just a country which is not one of a few named adversaries. A Singaporean owning company would comply with the law just as well.
> Who decides what is propaganda and what is not? EU commissariat?
Like most things in the EU it’s overly complicated, but I think sanctions are decided unanimously by the Council, which in this case would be assembled national ministers of foreign policy or security.
These people think that minimum wage "fact checkers" who delete posts that don't agree with their handbook are "freedom", not "censorship". So they think they have principles.
This is an absolutely unhinged take. The US doesn't allow more than 25% foreign ownership of broadcast media. That's not some "free speech" violation. If a foreigner wants to say something, they have many ways to do it. But they don't have those privileged ways.
But would you want the rest of the world to operate the same way?
If ycombinator wants to show HN to somebody in Germany then they would have to spin off a company owned by Germans to be able to show HN there? Same for France and the other 170-200 countries in the world.
This is obviously an unreasonable way for the internet to work.
Are you trying to say there's some utilitarian principle where countries should allow companies from other countries to operate unrestricted?
I'm a fan of free trade! That's a good thing! But tolerance is not a moral precept. We don't have to allow companies that report to hostile foreign governments to operate!
Even among friendly nations, the European governments are fairly opinionated about how US tech companies are allowed to operate in Europe.
Let's say it's the same situation as now. They made a super addictive app that doesn't have any overt nazism but it's fully under the control of the NSDAP, we don't know how the algorithm works, and they can bias it anytime they like. It's extremely popular and most young people use it. Would you say this is fine, yes or no?
> Even if they can tune the algorithm at a whim to include just a bit of antisemitism
You mean like all the US social networks banning or severely restricting the content on the slaughter being perpetrated in Palestina, mostly against innocent people and kids, while tik tok allowed it?
The answer is still yes, instead of the holocaust I will gladly take an app with just a bit of antisemitism, that, BTW, is not lacking on the platforms we all use and originated in the USA
Now, that's not what's happening on tik tok, that's what's happening in your mind, as a thought experiment I would accept nazitok and tell my kids to not use it, instead of the holocaust and having no power to stop it in any meaningful way.
Wouldn't you?
Would you really reproduce the holocaust, just so you don't have to educate your children and explain them the right from the wrong?
I don't understand where "instead of the holocaust" came from. I'm talking of a hypothetical modern-day Nazi Germany that's just as awful as the real one, and whether you would allow their funny dancing app. There's no either-or.
> I don't understand where "instead of the holocaust" came from
Since we are speculating, a modern day Germany has not perpetrated the holocaust, or it would not be allowed to exist in the European Union.
> Nazi Germany that's just as awful as the real one, and whether you would allow their funny dancing app. There's no either-or.
But what tik tok has to do with that?
If nazi Germany was still alive and kicking, it means we would all use their apps, because we would all speak German.
It would be what the USA are today.
We in fact use American apps or buy American devices even though they allow very bad content or are produced where labor protection laws are inexistent and worker are treated like slaves.
No one said anything about the European Union. Let's say our hypothetical modern Nazi Germany is in fact conducting the holocaust. Would you be okay with your kids using their funny dancing app?
Why is that such a big problem for you to understand that China is not the nazi germany and tik tok is not spreading dangerous ideas, it's simply less controlled by the US monopoly? (who are the nazi germany in this your little experiment)
But hey, you want an answer? of course I wouldn't be onboard with whoever is committing a genocide, just like I'm not on board with Israel and I boycott them and their products, as I am not onboard with the US foreign policy of the past 80 years (CIA was responsible for more than 90s changes of regime) and if it was for me US social networks would be banished in my Country.
I don't see many differences between the modern US and the nazi germany, besides the holocaust (which is not a small feat, I know, but hey, dangerous ideas are dangerous too)
It doesn't matter what I think, I am a no one, a genocide is not when USA say their adversaries are committing it but stay silent when their allies are condemned by internationally recognized courts (here, in the West).
BTW if you consider the Uyghurs issue a genocide, I got news for you: you should consider 80% of the countries of the World genocidal.
If you wanna play that game, no one should trade with the USA or use any of their apps and, god forbid, have access to their cultural (propagandist) material.
Take for example what's been happening at the Mexican border for decades
The US says more than 1.7 million migrants were detained along its border with Mexico in the past 12 months - the highest number ever recorded
By contrast "only" 1 million Uyghurs have been detained to date (according to our sources, that are not official sources, we don't even have real evidence, just wild guesses).
You don't know how much you don't know my friend, when I read something like this I always think: tell me you are american (or plainly ignorant, they are synonyms) without telling me.
This is obviously an over-the-top response. I quoted what you said:
> of course I wouldn't be onboard with whoever is committing a genocide
And asked if you were familiar with these particular atrocities. These particular atrocities are fairly different from the American/Mexican border in enough ways that your conflation is fairly bizarre (is there forced sterilization at the US Mexico border? What about forced labor? Or do you consider those to be unfounded claims that I would only believe because I'm an American?)
Tbh mostly the US and their allies seem to prefer not talking about the Uyghurs. And, I mean, what is the US supposed to do about it, anyway? (Contrast this with Israel/Palestine where the US continues to arm Israel with relatively few conditions on the usage of those weapons)
I am curious how you think the US should handle its southern border? My understanding is most European nations similarly struggle with large influxes of refugees. This is a global crisis, and you have actual data about it because the US doesn't kill journalists who research it.
I'm not saying "America shouldn't trade with China because of what's going on within their borders." (We are a huge trade partner with China. We were a huge trade partner with Russia before they invaded Ukraine)
I do think it's reasonable for America to ban TikTok.
Now let's talk about segregation and eugenics politics that inspired the Hitler third reich and went on until the 1970s and are having a come back now with the resurgence of neo confederated ideologies and literally the KKK .
a place with the largest incarcerated population of the world where the police is as brutal as in some developing country where the mob and drug cartels rule and where people shoot at each other at the same rate of countries at war.
For comparison in USA there are every year 20 thousands intentional homicides, while in China they are 7 thousand, but China has almost 4 times the population of the USA.
Would you use an app coming from such a place?
> And asked if you were familiar with these particular atrocities
It's not a genocide.
> I do think it's reasonable for America to ban TikTok.
I do also think it's reasonable for China to ban US social networks and Europe should do the same thing.
Now you have to explain how 2024 China relates to the Nazis, though.
Nazism is an 100% western creation, had many supporters in the west and in the USA, and Hitler himself was inspired by the segregation laws in the United States for his reich.
I'm not comparing China to it, it's just an extreme example. If you are such a free speech absolutist that you think all foreign-controlled media should be allowed (and encouraged to do business in your country), does that include the nazis? And if not, where do you draw the line?
> If you are such a free speech absolutist that you think all foreign-controlled
You said all, I never said all, I just said instead of the holocaust I prefer tik tok.
You are the one that prefers the holocaust to tik tok and has to live with it.
> where do you draw the line?
I'll gladly answer: I draw the line where illegal or seriously dangerous stuff is happening.
For example I would have banned any social network that promoted the so called "challenges".
But the tik tok case has nothing to do with that, it has to do with the fact that if the US cannot control the narrative, they do not want Americans to use it.
Which is the exact same thing the nazi did, back then.
They did not trust their people to make the right choices.
> When did the US citizens become so subservient to their government?
Technically speaking, they did in 1789. As to the practicality of it, the US government expanded massively from 1900-1950, so maybe during that time period. The FCC was formed in 1972, so on the issue of permissible purveyors of brain rot, maybe then.
The Chinese government does not have the right to free speech in this country. And since they are the ones controlling the algorithm that controls what people see on the app, then it's China speaking not the people who are posting.
The black box algorithms that are at the heart of TikTok and Instagram are very powerful and have the potential to be very dangerous mind control weapons, quite literally. It should all be blown up, but keeping that weapon from China is good.
Shout fire in a crowded theater. Its literally the first example in that you aren't allowed to say anything you want whenever you want. You only have protection against government retaliation.
In the US, shouting fire in a crowded theater is expressly allowed per Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969. It puzzles me why it is so often trotted out as an example of things you can’t say since we had a whole Supreme Court case that determined the opposite — it is arguing the losing side. The kind of speech that is disallowed in the US is very narrow, much narrower than people apparently assume.
> This is just the paradox of tolerance, if you allow everything you won't be free for long.
This. As a nice clear-cut example see the propaganda being pushed on how Haitians were somehow eating everyone's pets. Even if someone somehow ignores the extremist call for violence, the fact that this propaganda campaign was targeting perfectly legal and legitimate immigrants should be very telling.
In the US propaganda is free speech. We allowed enemies of the US to circulate Communist newspapers in America during the Cold War because we believe the people control the government not the government control the people
An an American, I also find it outrageous. In fact, as I understand it, our most fundamental law (the Constitution) clearly guarantees "freedom of speech and freedom of the press" which specifically means that the government may NOT shut down a particular publisher because the government does not like what they say, or who it is that owns them.
Unfortunately, our Supreme Court unanimously disagrees with me about what our Constitution requires.
This constant conflation of speech rules and trade rules is tiresome.
If it was just about content then yes, it'd be unconstitutional.
But security/trade concerns about a geopolitical opponent are not the same thing, have never been the same thing, and it would be crazy to treat them as the same thing.
Not to mention that as a trade issue, China already bans basically all the popular American social media sites, and just a ton of popular US sites in general. Turnabout is entirely fair play and expected when it comes to trade.
However, these rights should be guaranteed to a company operating in the USA and strictly adhering to US law. Of course, if the law is (arbitrarily) changed to make this illegal due to the Chinese government's stake, then it could be forced to shut down, but that would be inconsistent with the constitution.
> However, these rights should be guaranteed to a company operating in the USA and strictly adhering to US law.
ByteDance is a Chinese company with it's headquarters in China. The so-called TikTok ban is a call for ByteDance to sell off it's controlling position over TikTok, otherwise TikTok can no longer operate in the US.
The fact that China is spinning this issue as a TikTok ban is telling.
If they want to do that, of course they can. (And indeed, Chinese car companies are already treated differently in US law to such an extent that they aren't in the US market at all.)
You didn't say why that would be inconsistent with the Constitution, you merely asserted that it is. But it isn't.
Our government gets to decide the terms under which businesses operate in this country. Always has and always will. This is not a constitutional question.
No. Unlike a newspaper, they host videos and photos of a third of (?) the US population, have detailed reader data on who reads what when, who is friends with whom, location history, etc.
This data treasure trove may be stored in US, but it isn't protected from Chinese govt access. It is the same for data by American companies, which US Patriot act lets the US govt access.
Not necessarily. China pursues many objectives when it comes to its national security, such as intimidation and coercion of dissidents or opponents of its regime living abroad. Assuming China's equivalent of the Patriot act lets it treat TikTok user data as an open book, there is a lot for them to learn from it.
Foreign governments don't have a right to free speech in the US. They never have and the very idea is absurd. It's getting really tiresome to have to repeat this.
We already do that in the electoral process. Campaign contributions are "speech," while at the same time we ban foreign nationals from such speech (although as far as I know the constitutionality of the issue has not been tested beyond the 9th Circuit.)
The CCP does not have freedom of speech in America and it's not press. China has banned American apps including Google, Facebook, etc for decades at this point btw.
I thought that according law they are distributors, not publishers. That’s how they avoid liability for all the damage they do. They really try to have it both ways
They don't have to shut down. They can simply divest.
We don't allow own telephone system to be foreign owned, and those laws have been around for 90 years, and nobody is crying about free speech over that.
Actually, that would be considered a “time, place, and manner” restriction, which has been specifically ruled to be not a violation of the First Amendment.
Interesting. But the time here is basically "indefinitely", the place one that affects 150m+ people, and the manner the most draconian possible. Not a lawyer, but that seems like overreach to me.
I'd say it's more banning of specific communication platform like radio station since other similar type services could be developed and we have already seen attempts with IG reels and YouTube Shorts.
Also, censorship has been allowed by courts time and time again if it's narrow focused to satisfy compelling government interest and not overly broad.
From a historic standpoint, rights are peacetime luxuries.
The US sees China as an existential threat and TikTok is one of its key weapons. Tiktok is getting banned for the same reason Cuba can't have nukes. It's a national security concern.
I don't endorse it. But I understand it.
America blundered in the 80s by allowing technology transfer to then and still hostile foreign power. It has woken up to its stupidity 45 years too late. But better late than never.
I dunno. I wouldn't say the EU has done an amazing job of actually twisting companies arms enough to get them to a) provide the actual fucking product, not some bastardized version that's intentionally bastardized to make people voluntarily keep using the evil version, AND b) not be evil. At the same time.
Look at apple with the payment shit. They managed to do neither a NOR b! The data privacy stuff usually has companies just opting out of serving the EU.
So, there's clearly a very hard problem here, of how do you make these entities whose sole goal is to maximize profit, who have managed to figure out a way that makes tons of profit while having the only "pollution" be the damage we do to our culture/dopamine receptors. Which is a lot harder to get people mad about compared to oil in the ocean and smog in the air.
In the meantime, I don't mind us just trying to keep things at least vaguely geopolitically aligned. Look at what russia is doing to US politics with very basic tactics (reddit comments etc). Now imagine China trying to do something actually subtle.
To underline the difference I'm referring to, just look at tiktok vs rednote. Western users immediately getting banned from rednote for posting the "wrong" kind of LGBT stuff. There are some fundamentally different cultural expectations about freedom of speech. Can you imagine how censored talking about vietnam would be if the US took the same approach as China did w.r.t. Tienanmen Square?
> I wouldn't say the EU has done an amazing job of actually twisting companies arms enough
It takes a lot of time to open political eyes, break through lobby barriers, and get sufficient awareness on the deep issues. Then it takes an age - in business terms - for governmental action and regulation to follow. But if that is ramping up inertia builds and prolonged policy follows, hopefully as unstoppable tide. Other than some decent government regulation and old-fashioned unfair competition protection there's talk talk talk and not much that restrains Big Tech and the maddened billionaire class.
I think it’s more along the lines of the free market is great but if a foreign government has close control/ties with a pervasive social media business that it’s not great. Sounded like via an IPO they would have still had the ability to retain some ownership via the stock but would not longer have complete secret control.
It has too much influence for China to hold. Let’s be clear if an EU country held Bytedance this would not be an issue.
Really this is about not allowing China to do things and then not retaliating in kind. This is what China does to American companies and so no American company can really survive long term in China. It creates an imbalance and will eventually lead to China’s complete domination in most key industries. America is finally catching on.
You can't have this take without acknowledging the US is currently in a technological cold war with China. It's not old school at all, they've been hacking our infrastructure and stealing proprietary data from corporations for years (and vice versa, no doubt).
Having a direct adversary control what young people consume for hours a day with a black-box algorithm is very dangerous.
Also note that TikTok has been banned in Hong Kong for years now.
I also think it's dangerous for domestic companies to do this, but obviously the US gov't is going to prioritize China because politicians can take bribes (in the form of lobbying) domestically.
US was doing the same thing to its own citizens. refer Zuck's podcast with Joe Rogan. The DeepState used carrot and stick approach to make Zuck kneel. They would have destroyed Meta if Zuck didn't succumb to their demands.
> demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held
This is a reductive and misleading analysis. The US has already prohibited foreign entities from holding broadcast/common carrier licenses, or from owning significant chunks of equity in holders of those licenses [1]. It should be kind of obvious why a country would not want their biggest media providers to be foreign-owned.
You could argue that if the US wants to update the 1934 telecommunications act for the 21st century, it should do so more thoughtfully and comprehensively (I would agree). But the TikTok ban, however poorly written or haphazardly targeted, is fairly in line with a legal doctrine that has been commonly known and accepted for 90 years.
> The US has already prohibited foreign entities from holding broadcast/common carrier licenses, or from owning significant chunks of equity in holders of those licenses
But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.
It IS wrong for them to determine what we can and can't be influenced by. By saying bad countries "influencing" us is bad for democracy, they are saying democracy isn't really up to us, the voters, it's up to them. And I'll never accept that.
> But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.
Whether you _should_ need a license to distribute a media app in the US under certain conditions, and whether “Americans” (which ones?) really do want no limits on who controls their media, is the correct debate to be having. The person I was responding to believed the issue to be “US demands local ownership of TikTok just because it's successful and valuable” which is clearly wrong.
> But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.
The end result of your line of thought isn't the return of TikTok, it's the creation of an internet hosting licensing scheme in the US.
This is a great argument for the rest of us banning nearly all US social media tech from our countries. Frankly I'd support it given the new US government.
When I do a search on Google I give Google information. When Google gives me the results I get information. This data exchange or information barter involves “value” but no money is exchanged. Thus no taxes. This happens billions of times daily across all social media platforms. The analogy above is that data is gold is not far from reality and the data economy is mostly untaxed.
I think focussing on the micro is also a distraction here. An individuals data has almost no marginal value. But if you aggregate everyone's data then it does become valuable. This is why the whole 'just pay me for my data' argument never works.
By extension focussing on the negative impact on an individual is very small, but the overall impact on society and culture is massive (which in turn impacts individuals).
Taking that a step further I think you can argue there is some tragedy of the commons occurring which indicates govt. regulation should exist. Govt regulating media is tough, but as the US showing here, a rule getting rid of foreign actors might be a good idea for many countries.
Given that Elon Musk is supporting neo-Nazis in Germany,[0] banning Twitter/X is not a bad idea.
0. The neo-Nazis in question are the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD has many high-ranking members with neo-Nazi pasts, such as the leader of the party in the state of Thüringen, Björn Höcke, who used to write for a neo-Nazi publication under a pseudonym, "Landolf Ladig" (remind you of any other name?). This guy now runs the AfD in the state of Thüringen, the state where the AfD performs the best, electorally (33%, making them the largest party in the state). There are many other high-ranking AfD members with similar neo-Nazi pasts and affiliations. Then there are those who merely go on and on about immigrants, foreigners, minorities, but who are smart enough not to have explicitly associated themselves with open neo-Nazis. Needless to say, the fact that this sort of party is reaching 33% in some parts of the country is hugely concerning in Germany.
It is and EU started doing this more than a decade ago and has come fairly far. GDPR and other privacy focused regulation made great strides in restricting what US platforms are allowed to do in EU, and for government institutions there has been some movement away from US owned cloud services as a matter of national security and data protection. So far the reaction for US companies has been mostly to setup EU-only versions, or policies where data remains on EU located servers, but there was also a lot of "threats" about Facebook leaving EU or other sites blocking EU users as a response to those regulations.
The next round of regulations, NIS2 for example, is starting to get up steam. This year we also have the Digital Services Act. Time will tell if US media platforms continue to develop EU-versions, and in what forms, or if they give up.
In term of national security I would be a bit more afraid of Microsoft 365 than Meta.
You make that sound like it's a bad thing. There's extremely little genuine value left in social media platforms to the average user these days. Most are completely focused on getting you to want to doom scroll, not actually connect with friends.
Maybe its time to go back to a simpler MySpace or FriendsReunited style setup for actual social media. The problem is theres not much money in that, nor are people likely to visit as regularly.
You could still have "X Germany" or whatever, that cross-syndicates content with other "X $COUNTRY" companies. But it would be a local company, under the jurisdiction of local laws -- and that seems to be the point.
Especially with our billionaires openly declaring they are working with the oncoming administration because other powers like the EU trying to enforce their laws within their borders. China is just on top of the game since they are a provider instead of a consumer.
China and Russia and others like them are definitely way ahead. And the way I see this going is that countries take their digital borders far more seriously in the future. The era of the open internet is gone, and I don't particularly think it should be mourned.
Digital borders should only be open and allow free traffic between allies.
edit: since it won't let me reply to posters under here. What I mean is in stopping foreign propaganda and interference. Elon Musk can't spend hundreds of millions to influence e.g. the Chinese people in ways that benefit the US.
I don't think many people separate out the "incoming" and "outgoing" aspects of firewalls, and conflate firewalls with censorship. Most of the countries that employ firewalls do both, censor as well as protect. But it's not a requirement that you must censor your own people in order to stop foreign agents interfering in your society.
This is quite literally what banning TikTok is about. Suddenly the US has decided that they don't like it when other countries do to them what the US routinely does to others.
> Digital borders should only be open and allow free traffic between allies.
Oh, how far we have fallen.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
Nation states saw this, laughed, and proceeded to colonize the Internet almost immediately. The US is notable for (until recently) being the most open, but China basically never allowed unrestricted international network traffic. In fact, I honestly think China shouldn't have been allowed onto the global Internet on the basis of "no free speech for censors".
US owns most of the social networks, video streaming platforms and most of the classic media (tv,...).
The diffrence is, that countries like US (and many EU countries) point a finger at china/russia and accuse them of censorship, claim themselves to be free, and then do the same censorship that russia/china do.
I'd rather go for a consistent law. It if means that social media based in other countries should be banned, then ban all of them at once. Not just the ones that the national companies haven't been able to out-compete, because that seems a bit too convenient to be fair.
They should, and they should develop home-grown alternatives to these services. It's not that Tiktok shouldn't be banned, it's that Facebook and Twitter should also be banned. Megacorps should to be destroyed up regardless of their nation of origin.
For reference, the largest 15 companies in the world, by:
- Market cap are: Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Saudi Aramco, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, TSMC, Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, JPMorgan, Eli Lilly, Visa
- by # of employees: Walmart, Amazon, Foxconn, Accenture, VW, Tata, DHL, BYD, Compass, Jingdong, UPS, Gazprom, Home Depot, JD Logistics, Agricultural Bank of China.
- by earnings: Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, NVIDIA, JP Morgan Chase, Meta, Amazon, ICBC, China Construction Bank, China Pacific Insurance, Exxon Mobil, Agricultural Bank of China, Toyota
A) I'm flexible on the exact numbers here, but a starting point for discussion could be a company with more than 20% market share in a total market above 1% GDP. I admit that finding an effective standard that can withstand legal scrutiny is the hard part here, and we should work on improving it once we agree that megacorporations should be destroyed. I am still looking for a good way to cover vertical integration and other multi-market failure cases, for example.
B)
- Small business should be the driving force in the economy. They are the wellspring of competition and the bastion of the middle class.
- Megacorporations seek to destroy the ability for small businesses to compete with them, leaving buyout or vassalage as their only possible endgame. This shuts down true competitive threats to the megacorporations' dominance. They are trying to pull up the ladder behind them.
- A company should not be so large it can afford to ignore its customers.
- A company should not be so large that it can treat regulatory fines as merely a cost of doing business.
- A company should not be so large that it gets to write the laws and regulations.
- The Monopoly standard is not strict enough. Cartel-like oligopolies cooperate on the important political issues while maintaining a facade of competition.
- Our political systems are not equipped to handle the centralization of such large amounts of wealth. While the economy may not be a zero-sum game, power is, and power follows money.
- ADDED: A company must not be too big to fail.
- ANOTHER: A company should not be so large it can use loss-leaders to bully its way into other markets.
I don't think megacorps should be "destroyed". On the other hand, I do think that a whole lot of those countries grew up taking advantage of mechanisms and data that they seek to exclude others from having by use of their market power and restrictive contracts, and this should be prevented.
E.g. back to Meta, etc: they scraped everything, everywhere for a long time, and it was a big factor that lead to their rise. Now they seek to control all the data in their fiefdom, and use the power of the legal system to enforce EULAs to prevent others from doing the same.
Why? Because economic entities with market power underproduce, overcharge, and fail to innovate and meet their customers' needs. They cause deadweight losses through their inefficiencies. And an excess of concentrated power is just plain scary, whether an individual, a corporation, or a government wields it.
Of course, reducing some of the edge of market power at scale will result in a smaller maximum company size.
Those criteria seem pretty good. All those companies should be broken up and required to make certain divestitures until they no longer to-big-to-fail, oligarchical, anti-competitive etc.
Pretty much every country where it is economically viable to build an alternative has an alternative to these platforms that they aggressively push on their citizens.
Europe may be an exception, but that is what you get when the US is your suzerain.
China bans them. Europe, Canada and Australia are constantly trying to regulate the media parts of the business. If they had the capacity to built an alternative (like china) a ban or forced divestiture doesn’t seem that out there.
I would not be surprised if governments pushing back against all foreign social media is a major theme of the decade. America is basically saying to the world right now foreign social media companies are a major risk. The global reach of America's social media companies could be coming to an end.
No, they set up a framework where any other such case can be easily included in the ban. The executive order doesn't even name TikTok, except when referring to now-revoked previous things it revoked.
> (d) The Secretary of Commerce shall evaluate on a continuing basis trans-
actions involving connected software applications that may pose an undue
risk of sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, produc-
tion, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and
communications technology or services in the United States; pose an undue
risk of catastrophic effects on the security or resiliency of the critical infra-
structure or digital economy of the United States; or otherwise pose an
unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security
and safety of United States persons. Based on the evaluation, the Secretary
of Commerce shall take appropriate action in accordance with Executive
Order 13873 and its implementing regulations.
The set of countries that don't actively object to that is a strict subset of the countries the TikTok bill would have allowed TikTok to continue operating from if ownership had been passed to them.
This was a bill only against China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran. None of whom allow particularly free access to the internet.
For example the Facebook article on "Censorship of Facebook" lists all of those countries as well as Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and Uganda as the only countries that "continually ban access" to facebook.
Not that it's the only factor, but don't forget that for many countries, seemingly going "against" the US is very hard. Whoever feels like the US never puts pressure on western countries is probably a US citizen.
> And yet many countries have no objection with letting their citizens use US FAANG services?
You're talking out of ignorance. The European Commission has been putting together initiatives to allow European cloud providers to emerge as credible alternatives to the FANGs in terms of providing infrastructure.
Compare with China though. There is absolutely no way that a company like Bytedance would be allowed to operate inside China while under American control.
It's not quite the same. The EU has banned those companies from supplying network infrastructure. That infrastructure is used both by private individuals and by companies, ministers etc. AFAIK they have also banned TikTok on official government phones. However they have not generally banned TikTok for everyone.
To me this makes more sense since a back door in network infrastructure allowing governement communications to be intercepted is far more serious than some kid using TikTok.
> AFAIK they have also banned TikTok on official government phones. However they have not generally banned TikTok for everyone.
The US is not banning TikTok. The US is forcing ByteDance to sell it's controlling position on TikTok or else the company is no longer able to operate within the US.
No. The requirement is that ByteDance must sell it's position of a company. If you bother to learn about the law in question, it quite blatantly targets the ownership of the company, not the company itself.
ByteDance instead opted to shut the company down in retaliation, because it found it was desirable to just crash the whole company than to have anyone else control it, and in the process is fooling useful idiots into believing this has nothing to do with China's interference.
Saying "It is not a ban because if they give it to us then we won't ban it, but if they don't we will ban it but it still won't be a ban because they had a choice in the first place" sounds so ridiculous to me that I don't even know how to argue here.
You shouldn’t. Lest we forget, China has banned all American social media companies and quite a few other tech companies. Why shouldn’t the US do the same? Red Note should probably be banned too. The condition to lift the ban? Allow google, facebook, snap, etc in China. Until that day, I don’t understand why this is even a question.
I am fine with the US doing protectionism, it's their choice. But they should own it. Not always play the kings of freedom, with freedom being systematically defined as "whatever is best for the US".
It’s not even protectionism. US is the only country in the world to honor unwritten free market rules. Simply because people here believe in it. All we want is reciprocity. US is not protecting the Googles and Facebooks of the world. No one told the RoW to have restrictive politics that kill innovations to the extent that their best talent rather come to the US to pursue their dreams.
they didn't demand it be sold to the US. they just said it can't be owned by china, NK, Russia, Iran. a European company could buy it and everyone could keep using it.
> So is it fine when China does it, just not when the U.S. does it?
What are you talking about? No US corporation can operate in China without granting China control over your data. I mean, anyone with a cursory understanding of the topic can tell you how China effectively forces internet companies to design their China presence as completely siloed operations with very tight requirements in what personally identifiable information they store.
It is never okay, but the rest of the world (and sensible Americans) sees it as hypocritical when the land of the free does it.
The US government should just go ahead and say it like it is: they'd like to hold as much power as the Chinese government does, and they're taking the steps to do so.
The American oligarchy feels threatened because the empire is crumbling under their feet, so they're finally taking their masks off.
China is not just foreign, it’s a rising superpower who has demonstrated ongoing information and cyber attacks against the US, and who has a stated goal of invading Taiwan. It attempts to dislodge the US or West influence wherever possible. That’s different to eg Germany, France or Japan.
Playing fair is fine, so rather ask for level playing fields. Where there aren’t, apply pressure. Compared to arming other countries this is barely worth a big argument.
That’s a thoroughly disingenuous spin on the reasoning.
There is no movement to prevent foreign companies from having popular apps in general. The law is narrowly targeted. TikTok could continue to be foreign-held as long as they separated from the government of a specific foreign country.
I’m amazed at how many commenters are twisting themselves into pretzels to try to make this some generic imperialist move or use whataboutism to downplay the reasoning behind this move.
A decade ago it was common knowledge on the internet that China heavily controlled and shaped internet discourse within their reach, to push government agendas in an extreme way. There is no parallel to their cultural control in the US. Did everyone suddenly forget this, or are they just ignoring it for the sake of argument?
I found your angle very interesting. I'm baffled by the same thing. Is it that a new generation (that is now < 30) grew up without realising this? I wonder what is the age of average commenter here.
After reading more comments, I think this comment section is just full of people who only read the headlines and then assume the rest, rather than try to read the articles or understand what’s going on.
Whether you agree with the move or not, the storylines being pushed in hundreds of comments here don’t even reflect the reality of the law, let alone the reasoning behind it.
It’s also ironic to read all of the commenters that don’t realize that China already controls social media use within their own country to a degree far more strict than this. The amount of control that China exerts over everything from Facebook to Google within their country was a well known topic for years online. Here on HN people were disgusted that FB and others were giving in to government censorship in those countries. Now it all seems to be forgotten? It’s weird to me to see all of the narratives in this comment section being built on top of imagined realities with no regard for how other countries have been operating for decades.
Forget about reading articles even... the supreme court decision itself is not long, is written in understandable language, and breaks down point by point the things that they had to consider, why they had to consider them, and the outcome of that consideration.
As a European I noticed all the neo-authoritarian Russia supporters crying on X and BlueSky and therefore support the US ban on Tiktok. I am usually against the EU frenchies making up new regulations but they get a pass if they manage to ban Tiktok.
I don't think I'd support a ban if ByteDance was a European company or Indian or South Korean or Japanese. China is a unique threat given the totalitarian turn they've taken over the past decade combined with the fact that no Chinese company is truly private in its day-to-day operations. All Chinese companies must have CCP influence as a matter of Chinese policy. It would be like if T-Mobile (the US mobile division of Deutsche Telekom) was required to have the influence of the German government including the monitoring and reporting of phone calls to senior party officials.
As of today, they would not be following American law by continuing to operate. The rules were amended by writing a new law that they're now following.
The demand is literally stated to American or allies company. So this is not true. But that’s what national interest protection looks like.
Look at Germany and Europe in general , they pay money to arm their aggressive neighbor, still not able to shield themselves from China. And asking US to protect Europe .
I don’t think Europe , giving the situation is in position to suggest about national interest protection. It’s like drug addict talk about healthy lifestyle
Let's look at where we are with cold eyes (I'm European). Russian direct energy supplies to the EU have been cut, raising energy costs, all EU industries are affected, making it more difficult to compete with China and the US. Energy, which now comes also in part through expensive ships from the US, whom -surprise- is now able to threat to cut it off, increasing influence over EU politics, energy that it is now also paid with dollar currency, at the same time EU economic resources -that should be used for the internal development- are being asked to be diverged to buy US weapons through NATO.
So I would suggest to avoid the "US saving heroes" discourse. The reality sounds more like the US elite has benefited from the war (a big industry for them), so much that should be included within the suspicious list.
What pockets planned and backed up the Maidan rise that removed the Kremlin's puppet from power? Who aimed and intended such country to join NATO along years before this event?
Because can be guessed this aimed the psychopathic Putin to increase the violence of his mafia things, maybe someones expected this violence in invasion form, or another form that would drag Europe into the same position it is in now.
> Still not able to shield themselves from China
It would be interesting to read how one country has protected itself from China's dumping, among other things, considering the massive industrial companies and seaports the Chinese government already bought around the world, including the US.
> Russian direct energy supplies to the EU have been cut, raising energy costs
So the EU should have been more careful not to be too dependent on Russia? Maybe Germany should have avoided shutting down their nuclear reactors.
The idea that US should cut of our allies in Europe is stupid and insane but at the same time Europe made a lot of mistakes that it should learn from
> What pockets planned and backed up the Maidan rise that removed the Kremlin's puppet from power? Who aimed and intended such country to join NATO along years before this event?
No "one" planned it. It was a spontaneous grassroots movement that blew up when the authoritarian president tried to violently crack down on it.
> The consolation prize Yanukovych dangled before a liberal intelligentsia that hated him was the distant prospect of European integration. For a young generation in particular, “Europe” was the object of the greatest desire. In November 2013 Ukraine was expected to sign a long-anticipated association agreement with the European Union. At the eleventh hour, on 21 November 2013, Yanukovych refused.
> The disappointment was especially crushing for students, who felt as if their future had vanished; Europe would be closed to them. That evening a thirty-two-year-old Ukrainian journalist from Kabul named Mustafa Nayyem wrote in Russian on his Facebook page: “Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.”
> That night Ukrainians—overwhelming students—came to the Maidan—and stayed. They held hands and shouted, “Ukraine is Europe!” At 4 am on 30 November 2013 Yanukovych sent his riot police to the Maidan to beat the students. The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock. Yanukovych, it seems, was counting on the shock to shake parents into pulling their kids off the streets. That was when something remarkable happened: instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there. It was a historic Aufhebung of Oedipal rebellion. Now there were close to a million people on the streets of Kyiv, and they were shouting, “We will not permit you to beat our children!”
It's not just broadcasting of info, it's having information on your location, contacts, comments, biometric data, etc. It's the reason why the military banned it first. It can definitely be a national security threat.
> As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held.
These sorts of bad faith comments are so tiresome to read.
We all know that if the foreign country in question was Japan or France then nobody would really give a shit. Even a more neutral country like India or Brazil would likely be completely fine. It's specifically an issue because China is a geopolitical opponent of the US that we're engaged in a sort of new cold war with.
Not to mention, China blocks basically every popular social media site from the US already, and a bunch of other websites and apps besides. Tit-for-tat is very common in trade, you can't expect other countries to leave your foreign ventures untouched if you heavily restrict theirs.
Is your argument seriously, "yeah but if the US doesn't ban things as hard as China, it doesn't count"?
Personally I'd love for the US to ban or restrict more things from China. Not because that's the end state I want, but maybe it'd get China to loosen restrictions so that we'd get closer to parity.
No. My point is that the US is hypocritical about this. Every excuse is found to not call this protectionism. It is protectionism, period.
If Huawei smartphones are a national security threat that justifies a ban, then Xiaomi smartphones are as well. But those are not banned. Why? Because the ban is more for protectionism than for security reasons. Just own it, that's fine.
> Every excuse is found to not call this protectionism. It is protectionism, period.
Agreed, it's a trade issue. And anyone who's been paying even a hint of attention to trade knows that China is WAY more protectionist about foreign companies than the US is.
Reciprocity is or should be part of trade. There is nothing hypocritical about responding to trade restrictions with trade restrictions, any more than responding to an invasion with your own military force is "hypocritical".
> There is nothing hypocritical about responding to trade restrictions with trade restrictions
That's right, but that's not what I said. I keep having to explain it so I'll do it again: what feels hypocritical is that the US don't call those bans trade issues. They call them "national security". If you keep saying "we're the land of the free, China is bad because of their protectionism" and then you do protectionism and say "no no no, we are not doing protectionism, it's national security", then it is hypocritical.
Did you notice something similar about those companies, of which TikTok is included?
Social media is not normal capitalism - it’s defense industry psychological warfare tooling. We’re seeing this play out big time in the Israeli and Ukrainian conflicts right now and it’s time to take a wartime approach to the issue.
What’s also outrageous is that while there is no proof that the CCP is using TikTok for nefarious purposes in EU/US (at least for now), there is evidence of the owner of X using his power to influence European elections in many EU countries, while spreading misinformation and fake news himself. But we can’t ban it in the EU because our security-reliant master won’t allow it.[1]
This is the most disappointing part. We've let some of our companies do sketchy stuff because it's so hard to see where a new ecosystem will go ahead of time, and really hard to roll back popular ecosystems. But finally we have the political will to make a change for the better, and instead of ruling that 'oh turns out it is bad to allow XYZ, so here are some new rules preventing XYZ,' we're ruling that 'oh turns out it is bad to allow XYZ, so here are some new rules saying only I get to do XYZ.'
They don't have to sell it, they can simply choose not to operate in the US.
If Zuckerberg, or Musk (X), or Reddit, or Snap, or HN, or any Western platform would want to operate in China, they'd have to hand over control to a Chinese company. Instead, they simply don't operate there.
> "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".
It's been blatantly obvious since the beginning of time that the free market isn't a thing.
Foreign ownership of massive media platforms has been awful. The other way around as well. Would be fantastic if the EU banned Meta, for one. Instead they're suddenly scared of continuing to fine them for their continuous illegal data harvesting and gatekeeping to cozy up to Trump.
Just consider Rupert Murdoch. Every country he's been active in would have been better off if he'd been straight up banned from owning local media companies.
As a European born in communism, I find it dangerous for a communist and despotic state to yield so much power and for Europe to consider it business as usual, even if China may have started their own hybrid war with Europe, supporting Russia and preparing for the invasion of Taiwan.
China, BTW, is censoring or blocking all Western social media platforms and online publications. Why should we accept their online services when they are blocking ours?
Say what you will of USA, but they are allies and Europe needs to grow the f* up and stop being so tolerant of despotic countries, because our money and resources are fuelling their wars.
I understand that you're afraid of the US yielding so much power online, but then propose a European alternative, not a Chinese one. Let's innovate instead of complaining about US's tech hegemony, as right now all I'm seeing are complaints and regulations for tech we aren't building.
Eh-- Interjecting one's own opinion arguably amounts to intellectual imperialism.
Imperialism is a part of life-- whether it's mold in a petri dish, prides of lions or chimpanzees raiding neighbors.
We live in the wild where strength conquers. It's just that we forget that when we're insulated from reality by convenience, comfort, concrete, and naivete.
No one should be ashamed for conquering or for exercising their own strength to their own benefit. Only those unable to do so are the ones to complain. And the complaints are futile-- Resource Competition is a fact of life and it is not going away.
That’s rich coming from Europe. You guys pillaged rest of the world for 700 years. Took all the gold from the Americas then proceeded enslave Africans for centuries. And normalized it. Play by the rules? What rules?
