TikTok and Microsoft’s Clock(500ish.com) |
TikTok and Microsoft’s Clock(500ish.com) |
Suppose Margrethe Vestager called and said TikTok, you are banned unless you let a "very european" company take over your business? And by the way. We would like a cut.
And would the US still being able to say "national security" if it was fully owned by German business running on servers in some Swiss mountain?
Wouldn't do this make sense for Facebook? I would like to see a European company owning the European side of Facebook.
I really like Silicon Valley and their initiative, but again and again American companies have shown that they cannot be trusted with European data (maybe USA data either, but that is an internal matter of the USA).
Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are the new public squares for social discussion. Even more now that many people works from home.
I can understand USA decision on this matter (not the way as it has been imposed in a short time-line and without much feedback). And I can see that Europe not acting in the same way damages European citizens capability to regulate their own public spaces.
I also see anti-globalization as a risk for many other types of products and services. A healthy global market has provided growth and stability.
Meanwhile digital social networks have been a source of radicalization and manipulation of citizens from all around the world.
A different approach is needed to product shoes or phones that to provide citizens with public spaces.
Source?
Btw HSBC [1], Unilever [2] and many other European companies have had customer data breaches. I’m sure there would be even more but Europe has almost no top internet consumer companies
So I don’t have a lot of trust in European companies to safeguard customer data, curious to hear why you do.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2018/11/06/hsbc-ban...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Comment like this lumps tiktok, a privately owned company with the Chinese government with no evidence. It's never about national security but really about US politicians seeing a social network with real reach in the US that for the first time does NOT need to pay to lobby in the US, nor to be responsive to congressional inquiry (as they have been able to do recently with US tech platforms, accusing platforms of suppressing conservative/liberal views, again without evidence).
If you know anything about bytedance's founder you would know that he's been an outspoken globalist, criticizing the government's approach to free flow of information on multiple accounts. Uninformed comments like this is truly tragic for many globalist people in China who grew up hoping for a global stage with open, fair competition and who often do not agree with the government's perspective.
But nobody's talking about actual solutions. All this looks more like a witch hunt to me.
I suppose they could. But I am fairly confident that if tiktok was a German company, this would not be happening. China is reaping what they sew here. On top of getting a taste of their own medicine.
It is unfortunate for the Chinese owners though that they have to pay the price for their government's actions.
Individual countries might. I'm not sure whether we've seen an EU single market law vs national security case yet.
Plus remember when Zoom was a national security threat? You know with that Chinese guy in charge, the Chinese servers, the censoring on behalf of the CCP ...
Funny how that all disappeared when Zoom got in bed with Oracle.
This would make sense if the EU had any company remotely capable of being able to afford this.
Anyways, an insteresting case study for platform theory ...
Microsoft (or Google, or Facebook, or any similar cash rich company) could have bought Vine for tens of millions.
The product and algorithm could have been tweaked to be more compelling. Even if the new owner wasn't able to do that, using an existing established platform/audience then cloning the features of upcoming competitors is very powerful.
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-bytedance-britain/t...
For some reason, I'm not seeing many people talking about this at all. Everybody is still talking about justifications about why Tiktok should be banned. I therefore suspect that the issue is more emotional than rational in nature.
Caused me to spit-take.
"The proposed transaction gained the blessing of senior Trump officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who saw value in an American company getting access to sophisticated TikTok algorithms that decide what videos users are served."
I'm worried about precedent here, and whether this is just a pretext for creating a GFoUS.
So a technically inclined Android user or a user of a jailbroken iOS device can probably continue to use Tiktok, with effort, but will have much fewer people to interact with using the service.
Even if it was still usable via some kind of side-loading it would completely destroy the userbase.
Are we supposed to believe that the algorithms that a bunch of Chinese blokes came up with for a viral video platform are so complex that the US Govt. wants to intervene and help Microsoft buy it?
They probably will retaliate on American entertainment/content, considering those are more replaceable.
For this case more important is us investor. Hence the strange deal. Otherwise it would outright blocked like india.
The missng of Uk or non-chinese world is strange though.
Data centers, even engineering talent, is fungible. They are replaceable and therefore have no special value worth haggling over. But attractive young people wanting to dump their lives into a video app for pennies? That is the real asset in this deal.
I do not expect much technical depth in an app such as TikTok, nevertheless you will need dozens (and more) of engineers to run it and how do you organize those to a previously unknown structure. In theory that is simple but anyone with who manages code for someone no longer in the company knows otherwise. And the engineers that wrote the code weren't native in english either ...
If they buy TikTok's operations in the countries or, even just TikTok’s US operations, presumably they'd be acquiring, in either case, the existing US-based business, which (assuming the job listings on their website correspond in the normal way to existing staff) definitely includes developers and other technical staff at the Mountain View, San Francisco, Seattle, and Miami locations, at a minimum.
So, yeah, I think they are getting developers.
Now, do any of those developers work on the core algorithms of interest, or are those just black boxes supplied by ByteDance and shared with Douyin, or if not ByteDance itself some other part of TikTok that wouldn't be acquired? That's another question.
It’s surprising the UK isn’t part of the deal. I wonder if it’s another sign of the US’s foreign influence waning under Trump.
Half the world is currently pissed with China. India already banned Tik Tok. The US could have used what is left of its diplomatic corps (devastated in the past few years) to encourage other countries such as the NATO nations, 5 eyes countries and other allies to threaten to ban Tik Tok and the likes of China didn’t resolve their security concerns. And the vast majority of them would have agreed, essentially forcing China to do this or something similar without the US losing its moral high ground, and gaining strength and respect amongst its allies instead of looking like a street level rent a mob type.
The same with the TPP. The US under this administration and tried hard to punish China, and basically, over the past few years has managed to slightly alter the fortunes of 2 individual companies, at a huge cost to its local farm sales, and hasn’t gained much in return at all, while hurting China only marginally.
If they had remained in the TPP, they would have had a much greater effect across Chinese companies (since it wouldn’t require cherry picking individual companies and acting specially for each of them) and the influence would have been levered since it would have come from pretty much every neighbor of China, and further, would have come at little cost to the US.
What’s most disturbing about these actions isn’t so much the actions themselves, but the fact that they have traded away so much of the US’s reputation built over generations, cost the US so much in rep and straight up cash, and has barely got it anything in return. And all this while much more effective alternatives which would have cost the US nothing but instead would have helped it strengthen its position in the world, existed by acting through its alliances.
for all you know they will end up overpaying
In this case, the government is playing the game on both the sell side and the buy side (and in another weird twist appears to be demanding a fee from the buyer?). There isn’t even plausible deniability into the government’s high handedness.
I suspect the evaporation of benefits the US has accrued over the past decades/centuries will be much greater than any short term gains it may see out of this and potentially any other similar future deals.
A transaction of the type the president envisions could also prove more expensive than the one Microsoft described on Sunday. Trump said Monday that part of the amount paid to buy TikTok would have to come to the U.S. Treasury Department because it would be making the deal possible.
“It’s a little bit like the landlord/tenant; without a lease the tenant has nothing, so they pay what’s called ‘key money,’ or they pay something,” Trump said. “But the United States should be reimbursed or should be paid a substantial amount of money, because without the United States they don’t have anything, at least having to do with the 30%.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/03/president-trump-might-be-eas...
So, to summarise: the president of the United States is openly advocating applying illegal real estate extortion/bribery practices to major M&A deals with geopolitical implications.
Possibly.
Axios[0] quotes Trump as saying: “A very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States. Because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. Right now they don’t have any rights, unless we give it to them. So if we’re going to give them the rights, it has to come into this country. It’s a little bit like the landlord/tenant”.
Make of that what you will, but it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about just taxes to me.
[0]: https://www.axios.com/trump-tiktok-banned-microsoft-fd45748d...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2020/aug/04/tru...
And people were laughing at Putin in 2012-2013 when he was saying in an interview that the Internet was CIA-controlled, not to mention the derogatory Western press headlines of when Putin's cronies took over control over VKontakte the same way as the US military-industrial complex is taking over control over the parts of TikTok they care about right now.
Room 641A? NSLs? Lotus Notes? The RSA fiasco? The EU report on Project ECHELON? The PSP? CNN? PBS Frontline? Edward Snowden? ... all the security news for the last few decades.
I might not agree with the idea that US companies are totally untrustworthy, but I would never suggest that idea is unfounded.
The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Invalidated: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-eu-u-s-privacy-shield-...
\s
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/07/microsoft-apple-and-alphabet...
So there is away for him to do it, but TikTok could challenge it legally.
It wouldn't be surprising to see them ban TikTok voluntarily and receive positive press coverage.
What baffles me is that nobody knows that this is happening. Nobody is trying to understand how the other side sees it, and to work towards a real solution. Or maybe people are just wilfully blind to this possibility. People are so convinced that their view is the only possible legitimate view, and that no other legitimate views could possibly exist.
it would be different if people exiled from china and were getting involving once they're in the western world, but to broadcast one's independence while in china is a moot point.
i have been to china many times and have many chinese friends, also many HK friends, and the chinese, while while very hospitable to the US will never pick US over china, never publicly or to an outsider anyways, they always follow the party line.
until the mentality of the regime allows and tolerates the discent there are no unique feelings on the other side to consider.
All this does not bode well for world peace.
Be careful of what you're wishing for. A democratic China may not be so different in terms of geopolitics as you would think (or they would be different, just not in the way you expect). Try reading what Kishore Mahbubani — ex-Singapore diplomat and ex-UN Security Council head — has to say.
Moreover, my TikTok information has already been compromised which pairs nicely with my SF-86 data that was also compromised with the OPM attacks. Why did I decide to even use the application to begin with you might ask? I chose to because I didn't want to rule out what is otherwise one of the most popular social media platforms in the country because of my own bias. TikTok is by far my favorite social media application I just no longer choose to use it. I will watch the TikTok content that trickles down into YouTube for the time being. I have no means to verify authenticity of your statement that the owner of TikTok is some sort of 'outspoken globalist' who condemns the Chinese government. All the while operating one of the largest growing social media companies based out of a communist country. If the US data is segregated from the Chinese based data centers then why did I start receiving text messages with Chinese characters in it within several days of downloading the application and creating an account? Was it all a coincidence? I would be naive to not believe that it was simply coincidental however it is damning.
Let me make my next point abundantly clear since you made some significant assumptions about my character. My concerns are rooted in a lack of trust with the Chinese government to keep my best interests in mind as a citizen of the United States.
Calling nearly everything on or related to the internet a matter of "national security" is to demand that everything be overblown.
People can't be convinced it's used for child pornography, because that's pretty easy to prove/disprove. So now the boogeyman is national security.
You don't need really need another language when you have a common one in place. Even without code comments you should be able to sniff out the crackpots.
Chinese repos are trending on Github everyday. They do really cool things beyond the cutting edge on every side of our business. From frontend react and vue to shiny ML and backend golang.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles this, but I can’t believe it will be without access to some TikTok engineers for an extended period of time.
I'm actually surprised the mature way Microsoft handles the Github acquisition. It's not anything like that of what they did with Skype. What you are referring to a managerial nuances on a blueprint like this.
And it is not like Microsoft would have any problem to multiply these engineers salary by 10X because they still would not pay software engineering market rate in Seattle or another hub.
Well, yes, because he's spent his entire career doing that and now he's President. See the case the NY AG is building against him.
It's the same as a tax on purchasing foreign goods, which is already in place for goods from China in the form of tariffs.
Has everyone really forgotten Saddam's WMDs so quickly?
We are not quite that bad here. (Yet, I guess, if we don’t turn the tide.)
And despite having this in mind, so many folks here just openly supported what is effectively a hostile and coercive takeover of a foreign corporation.
If some of the most educated people in this country can fall victim to populist xenophobia then I don’t have much hope for us overall.
“National security” is not a valid blanket excuse to implement draconian policies.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit in saying that the Chinese government is of concern, not necessarily the employees or owners of TikTok. But in all fairness, the Chinese government has a stronger ability to enforce their will on private business than seen in other places.
Addressing issues with Google and Apple is a tangential argument that is related but not entirely relevant to the conversation at hand. Why would I think TikTok is the only and last threat that will ever exist? I know that was a rhetorical question but a quite unnecessary one. To be fair, you don't know who I am so you can't make any assumptions of my intelligence or character outside of my comment history here on HN.
This is really an unprecedented situation so I believe it is fair to be somewhat cautious of further committing Chinese grown software into the pockets of tens of millions of US citizens. We are talking about mainland China here, not HK. If this company is so innocent then why did they pull out of HK? The acquisition of TikTok by Microsoft is interesting but why Microsoft? I don't believe Microsoft is doing it out of a sense of patriotism -- they want our data too. It isn't so much a witch hunt but we did get front row tickets to the bidding war on the commoditization of our personal data.
My rhetorical question was not meant as an attack on your intelligence, and I apologize if it came over like that.
I agree with your common ground. I will not disagree on the desire to be cautious. Putting down measures to prevent spying is justified.
I'm just doubting whether that is the actual intention of the US govt. Let's say that they require that all foreign companies that process user data must undergo periodic security audits. That would be an actual, practical, fair solution. I have no problems with that. But that is not what is being proposed here by the US govt.
The Microsoft sale should have been the ultimate solution: replace all personnel with US personnel, use US servers only. Yet the US govt is still forging ahead with the ban, providing Tiktok with no way to solve this peacefully.
And now, they are banning Wechat. An app that nobody in the US uses except Chinese people to keep in touch with friends and family. How is this protecting national security?
I am only against the disingenuousness of it all. I am frustrated at the fact that so many people, in their zeal to oppose China (note: not making a value judgement here on whether that zeal is justified, just stating the fact that the zeal exists), don't see this disingenuousness.
I (18 years old) have used TikTok for about 2 months, before deleting it because it simply got too addictive. In that time it learned what my favourite games are, what shows I watched as a child, my political views, my eating preferences, my technology preferences. The list goes on. While I'm not sure how much of this is saved in a black box and only known by the algorithm and how much they can extract, I'd argue that this is many times more valuable for China that my personal phone.
Furthermore the power to influence the algorithm, subtle and slightly of course, may slowly change the minds of literal millions of teens.
And yet nobody seems to be interested in this solution. People are still cooking up new reasons to ban Tiktok. Or ignoring the existence of this solution altogether.
Why do you think that might be? I suspect it's because the issue is more emotional and fear-based than rational. People are falling for the propaganda.
Yes, maybe I find it a little easier to trust Microsoft than Bytedance. But the problem is not who holds the data that I generate about myself.
The problem is that I have zero (or very little) agency to view or manage this data. That lack of agency is important because this data will have a tangible impact on my life.
Why not both?
Also please do keep in mind that the lockdown of both Android and iOS has been gradually increasing. If they slapped on all the restrictions all at once, it'd be too much of a shock to developers.
Only those who have access to the underlying classified information can legitimately make the argument. Those who don't have the same access must trust those who do.
The system breaks down quickly when the former group gets everyone into a war because they failed to vet the underlying intelligence or purposefully misconstrued the intelligence or they just moved the goalposts of "national security" to include preemption.
i'd much rather take democratic china's disdain than dictator's china friendly overtures. you can work towards a long term solution of common understanding under democracy.
Unless the Chinese people overthrow their government, and succesfully install a democratic government, they do not deserve to gain wealth through business with the rest of the world, and do not deserve to live a good life. The chaos and suffering that such a process brings is not important. The unknown chance that a post-overthrow government is both democratic and competent, is also not important. The fact that the Chinese people's lives in the past 30 years have become tremendously more free and more prosperous, and that these are the best 30 years in the past 3000 years, is also not important.
In the words of Kishore Mahbubani: do you want to FEEL good, or DO good? Condemning China on a single ideological issue, while ignoring the complexity of the context as a whole, feels good because it aligns with your values, but doesn't do anybody anything good.
Actual good changes are achieved through more dialog, better mutual understanding, better relations and rational approaches.
i don't understand your argument, just because the chinese are wealthy and happy doesn't mean they can't be be shunned for their ideology.
your argument is like the comment i heard when i traveled to chartleston and all the locals still to this day lament the civil war -- the war of northern aggression -- and how prosperous and beautiful life was in charleston [beacause it was all supported at the colossal expense of slavery]. this is your argument for china: ignore the slavery of the mind and actions, look how prosperous they are; well, some of them anyways.
i'm happy to say that i live on the side that won't sell you a seat at the table simply because you've brought a bunch of money with you. that there is some principal reason that goes beyond that.
Privacy is a legit angle, but why focus on Tiktok alone? Talk about privacy law reforms so that Twitter and Facebook are also included.
I'm talking about Tiktok. There is nothing amoral about protecting your country from data collection by a hostile foreign power.
It is not that hard to see. It is amoral for the US to collect data on its own citizens, because historically, the government uses this data to erode our rights.
How? What security risks does the DM inbox of a 16 year old possess?
- people in the know can shape the narrative
- shady domestic or foreign powers can get access
- a future potential non-democratic dictatorship has a turn-key surveillance and propaganda tool already up and running
I think that's bad.
You also state a number of things that I think are not as factual as you believe. I do not know whether you are interested in challenging those believes, so I will keep my mouth shut about them unless you indicate you are willing to.
i understand where you're coming from when you say "denying business with them"... but i believe that approach is taken because it is such a bottoms-down regime. because any business invariably gets approved by the regime and simply benefits the regime. it's not like a dissident is allowed to live there disconnected with the government and do business independently and start a voice/party to challenge the status quo -- that business man is there because the government allowed him to exist and he knows it.
The US has already "seized" Facebook because it operates under US oversight.
I'm not sure I express myself clearly enough. The US (apparently, de facto) is OK with companies violating all sorts of personal privacy, as long as the US gov has the final say in how the data is used. If a foreign power is doing the same to US citizens, or even non-US citizens, the US is not as OK with it, because it would cede that advantage to some other country.
Why is that not a security risk? If it isn't, what's the minimum number of users you should have before you start becoming a risk?
There have to be some standards and arguments to justify a blanket ban. Just weaving the "national security" wand seems, to me, inconsistent and dictatorial.