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Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

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Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#331

Post by elisbce »

I thought the HackerNews crowd could do better than "Google/Apple/X is offering something censored / is complying with local laws / local government requests in China/Russia/X so it must be bad and they must stop".

Don't be so naive.

1. In order for US/international companies to survive in China/Russia/heavily censored countries or regions, they have to comply to local laws. Otherwise they are blocked or shutdown completely.

2. Despite having to comply, most of the times these large global companies have some power to fight back, negotiate and find middle grounds.

3. Having a presence is critical for the sake of the local people to seek information. Having Google censoring the search results would be 100x better than having Baidu willingly fake it. Having Apple fighting for all the information requests is 100x better than having local giants like Tencent and Huawei willingly building monitoring and censoring capabilities for all users.

Without the presence, the people in these regions and countries have no choice. They don't have ways to access even censored information or knowing about the censorship at all. They will be fed with much more twisted information. Companies like Apple are doing their best negotiating and fighting back. Maybe they have to comply with 10% of demands, but the local alternative will do 100% in a blink of eye. And ironically they are the target of blame in both China and the US. It is not fair to them.

Would you rather have someone fighting for the people, or would you want them to be like North Korea where nobody outside can get in?

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#332

Post by magicalist »

borski wrote: post #306
bigmattystyles wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they unavailable because they specifically didn't cave though?

No. They’re unavailable because they refused to go back into the market after China got caught using espionage. Were it not for that, it’s very possible Google would have caved; we don’t know how that would have fallen. It’s convenient they didn’t have to answer that, but not because they didn’t cave.

Absence of evidence doesn't seem as definitive as you're making it here, but it's worth noting that we have two counterfactuals we can use as a prior: Bing still works in China and Yahoo only pulled out last summer, in spite of public espionage and hacking incidents.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#333

Post by [deleted] »

Sebb767 wrote: post #311
joakleaf wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one thing because we outside China would automatically assume they are showing the same thing inside China as we see. Now we know that is not true. That is deceptive. ... And a a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.

> Well, for one thing because we outside China would automatically assume they are showing the same thing inside China as we see. Now we know that is not true. That is deceptive. Would you expect a big pop "WARNING: THIS CONTENT IS SHOWN DIFFERENTLY IN MAINLAND CHINA DUE TO REGULATIONS!"? Also, this will mostly yield a well-duh response. The only "appropriate" option in scale would be to put it somewhere in the fine…

[deleted]

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#334

Post by onepointsixC »

sneak wrote: post #268
onepointsixC wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's completely wrong. How is it that one of their largest global competitors, Samsung, exists despite having no factories in China for years now? Apple could leave China just fine as far as manufacturing is concerned. The question is would it be able to still sell to the Chinese market if it does.

Foxconn has an iPhone City of hundreds of thousands of people (something like 350k). They make something like 200 million iPhones per year. If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree. Producing something of the iPhone's quality, at the scale of a half million per day, every single day (that's 23,000 per hour, every hour, 24/7, for an entire year) is not something one can just pi…

>If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree.

Then let's agree to disagree, as Samsung, with it's 253 million shipments[1] does exactly that having explicitly moved out of China[2]. It is not impossible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-china/samsun...

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#335

Post by mensetmanusman »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #50

Daring Fireball [1] has another passage from the article which is illuminating with regards to any promises Apple makes about how it will resist governmental pressure to compromise its products, vis-à-vis Apple's CSAM scanning tool. "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial di…

Hard for me to imagine the mindset of a bureaucratic drone who demands that people change the definition of physical reality.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#336

Post by quitit »

qeternity wrote: post #73
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #50

Daring Fireball [1] has another passage from the article which is illuminating with regards to any promises Apple makes about how it will resist governmental pressure to compromise its products, vis-à-vis Apple's CSAM scanning tool. "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial di…

I totally get that people want companies to act with dignity, but the idea that a company, even one as large as Apple, is going to make any sort of difference with respect to China's oddities is wishful thinking. Apple has a business to run. They abide by all sorts of requests in various countries in which they operate. Of course there has to be a line somewhere, I'm just not sure this is it.

That is a good question about why there is more emphasis on companies doing political advocacy rather than one's own government. It seems too weighted in companies doing the heavy lifting when this is likely to interfere with business objectives.

Local investment requests however aren't novel - India have made similar requests which Apple have also fulfilled. China is only notable here because they have consistent human rights abuse issues, and with that there is a certain idealism that any kind of interaction with such a country is a form of consent.

While Apple's situation here isn't particularly noteworthy, it's a good proxy for a wider question about US companies reliance on China.

Also those with a keen eye would notice that China hasn't given Apple much here - they are still regularly admonished by the state-run press and Apple have only a handful of their most basic services available in the country.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#337

Post by star-trek-fleet »

vineyardmike wrote: post #288
justicezyx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? China invest heavily in Xinjiang. Xinjiang GDP is 19th on the list https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%8D%8E%E4%BA%BA%... Per capita GDP is similarly ranked. And there are 56 minorities groups in China, they were all have specific aid program, like preferential treatment in national college exams. What's the basis of such a wishwash statement on China and the people? Are you suggesting Chin…

> Are you suggesting Chinese people are practicing racial segregation? Lol. Are concentration camps segregation? Because if so, then yeah that is what most people (outside of china) suggest is happening.

[flagged]

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#338

Post by 908B64B197 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #261
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair." As a publicly-traded, trillion dollar company, where profits are at stake, this would seem to make sense. What does not seem to make sense is why anyone would believe Apple might ignore its own financial interests and those of its shareholders and deliberately sacrifice a major opportunity^1 in order to resist government pressure based on so…

Apple shouldn't have to. There should be laws that US companies can only cowtoe to the US government WRT free speech. In this case - it appears to only be happening in China - which I guess is fair game. But the line should be drawn at China being able to use its market to force US companies to censor people outside of China.

> There should be laws that US companies can only cowtoe to the US government WRT free speech.

Completely agree.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#339

Post by bmitc »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #302

When businesses become so large, they no longer are a $countryOfOrigin company (A US company in the case of Apple). They become multinational entities that have no loyalty to a nation, just loyalty to pocket books.

That is an excellent point and one I have tried bringing up before. Allowing corporations and individuals to obtain such massive amounts of wealth is a national security threat.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#340

Post by cronix »

elisbce wrote: post #331

I thought the HackerNews crowd could do better than "Google/Apple/X is offering something censored / is complying with local laws / local government requests in China/Russia/X so it must be bad and they must stop". Don't be so naive. 1. In order for US/international companies to survive in China/Russia/heavily censored countries or regions, they have to comply to local laws. Otherwise they are blocked or shutdown com…

> they have to comply to local laws. Otherwise they are blocked or shutdown completely.

I'm for the "we're for human rights above profits even if it means we don't do business at all in your totalitarian country" camp.

> or would you want them to be like North Korea where nobody outside can get in?

How many people are actually trying to or even want to get into NK? How many would like to leave?

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