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TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

reuters.com

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Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#481

Post by tehjoker »

eanzenberg wrote: post #356
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's morality has always come down to "might makes right" and it's quite clear that many people believe that's a perfectly satisfactory state of affairs.

Why fund your own demise? You can’t take the moral high ground with an immoral enemy. This isn’t a movie.

I find it difficult to recall the last time America took the moral high ground that wasn't based solely in looking good for anti-communist purposes in the last 75 years. The only exceptions were when domestic unrest forced the ruling class to give protestors civil rights.

In particular, US foreign policy has been a long unending horror show of bombing, invasions, and starvation via sanctions. At the UN our record is dismal at best, with the US often standing entirely alone with regressive countries we've bought off like Saudia Arabia on a litany of issues.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#482

Post by sudosysgen »

eanzenberg wrote: post #356
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's morality has always come down to "might makes right" and it's quite clear that many people believe that's a perfectly satisfactory state of affairs.

Why fund your own demise? You can’t take the moral high ground with an immoral enemy. This isn’t a movie.

That's not the issue. The issue is then to claim the moral high ground to compel other people to sacrifice something.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#483

Post by katzgrau »

rat9988 wrote: post #465
katzgrau wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said if it's a matter of national security. > TikTok is not a national security problem, no more than Whatsapp or Telegram or Skype is a national security problem. Yeah, you don't actually know that. What we don't know is the most consequential for us. China is ambitious and is clearly engaged in a long game against the US. We should watch our backs, no apologies necessary.

From an outsider view, all I see in this thread is the US constantly attacking china and accusing it of what they are doing to them.

#2 always wants to be #1, #1 wants to stay #1. This has played out many, many times throughout history. Pick your loyalty.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#484

Post by _6fmb »

albacur wrote: post #470
_6fmb wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they didn't, both Facebook and Google decided to quit themselves. Remember Dragonfly? Google just tried to get back into China THIS YEAR and was blocked by the US government. It's the US that's closing access to China not the other way around.

Wrong, Facebook was blocked in China following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots because Facebook refused to release information about Xinjiang independence activists. In March 2009, China blocked access to Google's YouTube due to footage showing Chinese security forces beating Tibetans. Access to other Google online services was denied to users arbitrarily. The search engine remained operational under the condition that th…

What do you mean wrong? You just supported what I said, both companies decided to leave by themselves, one by not cooperating with authorities after the 9/11 of China, and the other by refusing to censor even though the requirements were very clear for google. They would still have services there if they cooperated like TikTok is cooperating with the US admin. TikTok is clearly a case of protectionism whereas the reverse is not true.

The government telling you not to do something is called blocking if you're not being disingenuous.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#485

Post by [deleted] »

osrec wrote: post #397
zmmmmm wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm even more cynical. I don't think it's an accident that Zuck is playing much more friendly to Trump than people may have expected. This would be the perfect quid pro quo. I hate to think it could be happening like that, and it sits purely in conspiracy theory land. However it is completely consistent with the level of corruption from the administration in other areas and amoral approach by Facebook to its…

Well, Tiktok has taken all the younger crowd away from Facebook and Instagram. Your suggestion is not beyond the realms of possibility for a guy like Zuck (I always think back to the dumb f comment he made a few years ago to remind myself of how he views his users).

[deleted]

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#486

Post by sudosysgen »

YarickR2 wrote: post #380
billfruit wrote: post #195

As someone from the third world this leaves a very bad feeling if it happens. I do expect it runs into legal hurdles before that. Neither Apple nor Google have found TikTok problematic enough to delist them from their app stores. Neither is there charges that TikTok may have broken US laws. Banning something which hasn't broken US laws, on arbitrary grounds shouldn't be possible. The President shouldn't have authorit…

From world policeman to world bully, in 4 short years

As we've seen recently, policemen are often also bullies. This applies to essentially all monopolies on violence, including the one of the US.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#487

Post by getmeoutofhere »

jariel wrote: post #143
robert_foss wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking that US market forces will open the chinese market after decades of failing to have that effect seems rather naive.

It's not 'US market forces' that will open China, and it never was. It was the opportunity to expand into global economic markets, with a certain perspective in mind, ballpark along the lines of Western Liberal Democracy and Economy. The Asian countries that followed this path after WW2 were enormously succesfull: South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan. They are basically beacons of prosperity surrounded by…

You cited various Asian countries, but literally every one of those countries paved the same path as China. Authoritarianism with protectionism (as allowed by the rules of WTO developing nations), followed by economic prosperity and democratization.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#488

Post by getmeoutofhere »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #477
getmeoutofhere wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China's actions are actually legal under 1. WTO rules which allow developing nations to have some sort of protectionism to foster their own industries, and 2. Their own laws, which companies can choose to abide by. Google and Facebook were never wholesale banned by China. You can see this with the fact that Google tried to re-enter China with project Dragonfly (a China-law compliant search engine), until it internall…

Google trying to re enter China has no bearing on whether or not they were banned or are banned. And actually, I was living in China when Facebook stopped working, and I was living in China when google.com stopped working, and when google.cn stopped working. And you are right, they were never officially banned, China would never admit to that, they just used the GFW to make them stop working and commenced a lot of wo…

You just ignored what I said and straw-manned the specific nature of being banned.

As I said in my previous post, both can operate in China if they choose to comply with Chinese laws. Hotmail and iCloud do, and both works fine in China.

Google and Facebook being banned is no different than if they'd been banned for not complying with GDPR in EU.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#489

Post by wadkar »

manfredo wrote: post #419
billfruit wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really this move seems nothing related at all to US companies not having sufficient access to China. If then why this 10 year gap from action to reaction. Many here seems to take this particular view of this move being a retaliation of some sort, but I feel that is a naive view of what US is doing here and how it will be perceived around the world. Put in specific data protection/privacy laws and regulations applicab…

Politics moves slowly. 10 years is barely more than 1 presidency. China bans Facebook despite the company offering to comply with censorship/propaganda rules (and Zuckerberg even offering Xi to name his child). The ban is unambiguously due to strategic concerns over a foreign company having access to user data. The change in US policy towards Chinese apps is not retaliation, it's just the US coming to the same conclu…

> The ban is unambiguously due to strategic concerns over a foreign company having access to user data

So Europe/India/everyone else should ban US apps? It becomes a slippery slope.

> the US coming to the same conclusion as China that letting rivals foreign powers control media companies is unwise.

If you’re worried about a foreign company manipulating media then put in laws and regulations. That way American companies can be hold accountable to the same standards by other countries as non-American companies and creating a level playing field.

Re: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to clinch U.S. deal – sources

#490

Post by partiallypro »

getmeoutofhere wrote: post #472
partiallypro wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately I feel that it is US who has been more to blame (contrary to much of Western media coverage) for the deteriorating US-China relationship, and drumming up the chorus for a new coldwar. Chinese policy seems to have not significantly changed in the last 5 years towards the US, but on the other hand US seemed ever more keen and eger to pursue a hostile attitude towards China. In what universe? The Chinese gl…

> Not to mention they have literal concentration camps where they are harvesting organs, hair, using them as slave labor and stealing their possessions. If you dig into this deeper, this is literally fake news. The sources for these claims are either the World Uighur Congress, a NED funded organization, or Adrian Zenz, a Christian fundamentalist who believes in the rapture, is Anti-LGBT, and praised the Nazis. If you…

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