US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days • Hacker News Board

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#981

Post by ikerdanzel » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #538

hintymad wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just reciprocity? China banned a long list of media companies: FB, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, and every traditional media. Now the US is banning two apps made in China.

It's only reciprocity if you divide the world into two tribes, the "China tribe" and the "US tribe". Someone from the "China tribe" did something bad to the "US tribe", so now we're going to grab a random member of the "China tribe" and punish them for it, even if they're not the one responsible. I used to think the Western world had abandoned that kind of collective punishment, but apparently not. It ceases to be re…

Read USA law and constitutions. It is given in the law he can do this way before his presidency. And read up what happens on the other side to understand what really is "dictatorship" by changing laws to suit. Proportional system looks great on paper but consistently produce "proportional" government that can't act strongly due to political parties in-fighting. There is reason vast majority of people whether American or not accept the concept of manifest destiny. None ever accorded to GB, France, Spanish, Portugal, Italian or Germany even during their height of military superiority.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#982

Post by kosh2 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

ghostwriter wrote: post #515

Thorrez wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reciprocity doesn't justify repressing human rights. The pursuit of happiness is a human right. Some people pursue happiness by making dancing mobile apps and earning money with them. If China decides to limit that right it doesn't justify the US also limiting that right. Of course this is tiny compared to the much more extreme human rights violations we see in China, the US, and elsewhere. But we should uphold right…

The US doesn't limit human rights. People who pursue happiness are still free to do it. There are certain concerns around a particular corporate entity and a particular government directly associated with that entity, that has a track record of economic espionage, IP infringement, and denying US companies access to its country's market on competitive terms (the conditions that the US has been guaranteeing to almost e…

> The US doesn't limit human rights.

The US has killed thousands of civilians in its countless wars in the last decades. Just think of all the stuff that happened after 9/11 with Guantanamo Bay.

Yes, US citizens have much more right than Chinese citizens but when it comes to the rest of the world, the US so far has a worse track record than China.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#983

Post by kosh2 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:59 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #348

puranjay wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping Volkswagen from lobbying Germany to ban Teslas because all the cameras in it pose a "national security risk"? This is, by all account, a shortsighted move

The fact that we are allies with Germany and that the US probably buys a lot more from Germany than Germany buys from the US. With China, well, they are already blocking lots of American software companies so this would be more of a proportional response than anything else.

Being allys with the US is a special thing though. Just the other day the US threatened "crushing legal and economic sanctions" against a German port for being involved in North Stream 2.

"The US argues that the pipeline will increase Europe's dependence on Russia, which both Berlin and Moscow dispute. The US proposes selling European's American natural gas shipped across the Atlantic as an alternative."

But a greater dependency on the US is fine of course. The, as a champion of free trade, should be happy about more competition right?

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#984

Post by kosh2 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 12:10 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #525

ookdatnog wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you claim to stand for free trade, you can't go along in these protectionism wars without losing a lot of credibility and, along with that, soft power.

And you can't operate free-trade style in a world where you have bad actors like China reaping all the benefits while being protectionist and therefore preventing their trade partners from seeing the same benefits. Saying the US should just press forward with free trade is like saying it is X company's fault for failing when the entire reason they fail is because Y company is behaving anti-competitively, and that beh…

> And you can't operate free-trade style in a world where you have bad actors like China reaping all the benefits while being protectionist and therefore preventing their trade partners from seeing the same benefits.

China was pretty poor country when it opened up. When it opened, all the western companies that agreed to their terms weren't doing it just to help out but they wanted a piece of that huge marked to get rich.

China managed to get a better deal than a lot of other countries who were basically plundered. Saying China is "reaping all the benefits" is just absurd. Western countries made countless of billions in China.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#985

Post by not_that_jeff » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

krn wrote: post #460

readme wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bingo not a lot of people are indoctrinated into the world of national security, and because of that they just balk at it there's a lot going on in the world, and it's not a big happy place where everyone are friends, to put it bluntly china has other motives, I think a quick google should at least clue one in their corporate espionage activities

It is not the first time I am surprised by the complete unawareness of the world of national security in the US tech industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655803

if you believe that story, I believe you dont have the competency to work on a tech job. Go read some book in electronic engineering.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#986

Post by dheera » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

thekyle wrote: post #973

dheera wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real loser of this battle will be Apple, not China; they may just lose all their Chinese users in the US to Android in a couple months. The US is and will always be a free speech country, and they cannot go to the extent of imposing a firewall like China does. The extent to which they can take action is to require WeChat and TikTok off the app stores of the US. Which would leave Android users the option to instal…

In practice, I think iOS users will just move on to the next social networking app and forget that TikTok ever existed.

For TikTok, maybe, but WeChat is different -- people use it to keep in touch with families and friends at home.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#987

Post by will4274 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

Thorncorona wrote: post #899

will4274 wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the regulation of Chinese media is a matter of Chinese sovereignty And the freedom of that media is a matter of basic human rights. Your argument can be summarized as saying it's ok for China to deny fundamental human rights (free speech) to Americans as long as it is simultaneously denying those same rights to Chinese people because it's "a matter of Chinese sovereignty." I don't agree. Fundamental human rights ar…

How is freedom of the press a fundamental right? That is a uniquely American idea. Looking at Australia, allowing foreign companies (Newscorp) free reign over the press can have incredibly negative consequences.

From the universal declaration of human rights:

> Article 19.

> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#988

Post by runeks » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #877

baddox wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t follow the logic of “China does something that we think is bad, therefore we must do the same thing that we think is bad.”

I think the principle of regulatory reciprocity is fairly standard. If country X has tarrifs on your goods, it's fairly standard to bring up the same tarrifs on their goods into your country. Same with visa laws. If country X defacto bans certain products and companies from operating/selling in their country on the basis of national origin and not product type, then I would assume eventually the same would happen on…

> I think the principle of regulatory reciprocity is fairly standard. If country X has tarrifs on your goods, it's fairly standard to bring up the same tarrifs on their goods into your country.

We agree that it’s standard. The interesting question is whether it’s sensible.

Personally, as citizen Denmark, if Italy puts a 50 tariff on Danish sausages, I would prefer that Denmark not put any tariff on Italian sausages.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#989

Post by bharathlohray » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #324

I don't get it. It's US companies standing to loose their stronghold (near monopoly) on social, advertisement, and other forms of monetizing the web if the US creates a precedent for "national security" in this way, as in "we're welcoming social networks and free speech as long as it benefits the US and can be searched without warrant." Quite predictably, governments all over the world will be pressurized to question…

Advertising won't stop. It is just someone else who will make the money.

Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days

#990

Post by api » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 3:13 AM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #599

api wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But having the president order arbitrary punishment without proof of guilt (what happened to presumption of innocence?) looks like a dictatorship to me. It is. There's a faction in the US that believes the US has to have a dictatorship to compete with China. We've been here before. The USSR looked like an unstoppable juggernaut until the late 1960s / early 1970s. Like China they started from a state of relative bac…

> Totalitarian systems excel at execution, but they are not creative. Having survived the Soviet Union, I say with full certainty that you could not be more wrong about the execution part.

What about the USSR in the 1950s? I understand that by the 1980s it was a basketcase, but there was a time when it at least seemed to be the most rapidly advancing nation.