The End of the American Internet

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/10/3/the-end-of-the-american-internet

by 1cvmask • 6 years ago

154 157 6 years ago

zepto5• 6 years ago

It’s a good piece.

It’s also worth noting that TikTok is based on AI recommendation, like Facebook and YouTube.

It’s in many ways a special case (as they also are) of a particularly pathological kind of Internet that is only really represented by a few companies.

jariel• 6 years ago

America didn't have a 'monopoly' over anything, because America is not a single entity and there is nothing remotely resembling a strategy or coordinated.

China is a little different there.

The most poignant artifact from the article relates to the fact that TikTok is a 'first' for America, in that they've had to deal with something for the first time, which is a major foreign entity with different world views on their turf. It's should be added that China/CCP is a dystopian surveillance nightmare with a politicized justice system and effective CCP control of all major companies at least as far as messaging, surveillance and censorship is concerned.

But it's worth considering and it's interesting the press has not bee up on in for some time - we're in a 'brave new world' in software and services and it needs to be talked about.

Aachen5• 6 years ago

This sums up how I feel about the whole tiktok/huawei thing as a European. An interesting part of it not mentioned in the article is how the USA also pressures European countries into applying the same rules. And never for the reason "China has some horrible concentration camp problems that we, as a western country upholding ideals of freedom, want them to change and we need more pressure" but just for their own vague "national security" which to my eyes means economic reasons.

UweSchmidt2• 6 years ago

The national security concerns are of course real and massive; imagine what you can do if you can reach every single individual of another country with personalized content, and collect the most insanely detailed information on each of these individuals.

This is the next level, superseding many/most other means of power.

wombatmobile• 6 years ago

What "insanely detailed" information are you concerned about?

Are you as concerned about this "insanely detailed" information being collected by US companies? If not, what differentiates your concern when the information goes to foreign companies?

CapitalistCartr• 6 years ago

No need to imagine, US companies and the NSA have been doing this for years. You've pretty much described the business model of major "Social Media" companies.

Aachen5• 6 years ago

imagine what you can do if you can reach every single individual of another country with personalized content

Are you sure you're not talking about google.com here? Way more people across way more ages use that than tiktok and it also does tracking for the purpose of personalization.

Your reasoning would result in banning Google products (from the Play Store controlling most mobile computers across the planet to Gmail and YouTube) from all countries except the USA, and to a lesser extent banning Facebook products, Apple products, etc. Tiktok barely makes it onto the radar compared to those.

kryptiskt• 6 years ago

I wish Europe would have the guts to play hardball with China as well as the US. Why should we allow a Chinese social network when the Chinese market is closed for foreign companies?

bigbubba2• 6 years ago

Particularly American social media companies. Until the EU bans these, I don't think there is much hope for European social media companies which actually respect EU laws and regulations (American social media companies obviously have nothing but contempt for these regulations and will dig in their heels for every inch they're dragged.)

Just ban them already. Hobbling these corporations would help Americans too, for whom legislative reform seems like a pipe dream. Anything that harms these corporations abroad will negatively impact their ability to lobby American politicians. That might not be much, but it'll be better than the status quo.

Aachen5• 6 years ago

Why should we allow a Chinese social network when the Chinese market is closed for foreign companies?

One reason could be because that better fits our ethics. We might not have to lower ourselves to their level to have a competitive economy.

I'm not saying we have to be passive but "playing hardball" is usually a way to suggest the most extreme measure possible and I'm not sure this inequality is that bad. I'm much more worried about things like child labor and other issues China still has.

kanox• 6 years ago

Does the EU even have the legal tools to ban TikTok? It's a media company that largely complies with applicable laws, banning it because "it's from China" would be a major abuse.

People have raised the same issue regarding Trump banning TikTok and the legal basis seems to some national security law from the 80s?

I believe governments should not be able to ban TikTok.

coldtea6• 6 years ago

Well, the Chinese have some historical reasons to be cautious as they had been invaded a few times by the Europeans, whereas they hadn't done the revervse themselves...

Plus the whole "colonization" thing, which included Europeans invading and running 2/3rds of the world (including putting the pressure on Japan and China).

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

The chinese internet is closed, not their entire market. Even if the internet was open, imho it would be a hard market to dominate as there is a cultural gap that is not easy to fill

Meanwhile, europe and china have great trade relationships in just about everything, china invests in europe (especially in european countries that cant find investment elsewhere) and europeans invest in china.

I have increasingly the impression that China is a security threat to the US, but its not seen as such in europe.

3np• 6 years ago

We don't censor for political or economic reasons. I hope it stays that way.

PestoDiRucola2• 6 years ago

China has some horrible concentration camp problems that we, as a western country upholding ideals of freedom, want them to change and we need more pressure

I mean, it would be ironic if they would give this reasoning, considering the fact that the US currently has its own version of concentration camps which we, as western countries upholding ideals of freedom, should want to change.

Aachen5• 6 years ago

I'm not actually aware of the USA having concentration camps specifically. I know of some human rights issues, though, so for the sake of argument I'll assume this is a thing. Nevertheless, hypocritical or not, it would be better (from a worldsuck perspective) to decrease these issues in China than to not do that. And isn't the issue much more widespread in China than in the USA?

Looking for "concentration camp USA" on DDG, just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, it comes up with some site about customs and border patrol stations where refugees are imprisoned in for-profit facilities. Is that what you are referring to?

baskire2• 6 years ago

The us does not currently have a concentration camp. If they do please let us all know so we can put a stop to it.

On the flip side. The CCP has been committing a genocide by UN standards and has previously admitted to organ harvesting.

oh_sigh3• 6 years ago

Concentration camp in China = your race and religion mean you get a free invite you just can't say no to!

Concentration camp in America = break the law by entering the country illegally and need to be processed before you're deported.

Those things do not sound at all similar.

baryphonic• 6 years ago

This sums up how I feel about the whole tiktok/huawei thing as a European. An interesting part of it not mentioned in the article is how the USA also pressures European countries into applying the same rules.

The US has a treaty obligation to protect (most) European countries militarily, particularly from Russia but to a lesser extent from China and other countries in Asia. This is a partnership of course, and America's European friends contribute, but the bulk is still borne by the US for obvious reasons (gigantic military budget, global deployment, desire to preserve peace between France, Germany and the rest of the continent).

All of that is to say, for better or worse, the US feels that it can apply pressure. Brussels may not like it, but Washington knows Europe will choose America to Putin's Russia or Communist China most of the time.

HenryKissinger• 6 years ago

The HoloNet was a galactic communications grid that was developed, used and maintained by the Galactic Republic and later by the Galactic Empire. The HoloNet was a near-instantaneous communications network commissioned by the Galactic Senate to provide a free flow of hologram communication and information exchange among member worlds. It vastly sped up galactic communications, which had previously depended on more circuitous subspace transmissions or relays.

Created thanks to the Galactic Senate's efforts several thousand years BBY, the HoloNet quickly expanded throughout the galaxy, ending up with at least one emitter/receiver device located on virtually every planet of the Galactic Republic. The Holonet was operational by at least 3954 BBY.

During the Clone Wars, the Confederacy created the CIS Shadowfeed, a network of hyperwave transceivers similar to the Republic's HoloNet News channel. During this time, both sides used the HoloNet to broadcast propaganda.

segfaultbuserr• 6 years ago

It's said that the long distance to North America was a key factor that greatly restricted the power of British Imperialism in America, and indirectly led to the success of the U.S. Revolution. When the orders from the top decision-makers in the U.K. mainland took months to arrive, efficiency was low.

I wonder whether the absence of FTL communication in the universe could be the ultimate physical guarantee of decentralization of political power (which is not possible on Earth) and the protection against universe-wide, total imperial powers.

epx• 6 years ago

You think big :)

inglor_cz• 6 years ago

And yet UK kept India, Australia and Canada under its control, while losing the thirteen colonies.

It is probably a more complicated story than just "latency of the signal".

Koshkin• 6 years ago

Canada is in North America.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

"This is the first time that Americans have really had to deal with their teenagers using a form of mass media that isn’t created in their country by people who mostly share their values. It’s from somewhere else. That’s compounded by the fact that the ‘somewhere else’ is China, "

I don't know why I find this so funny, but I just imagine a completely terrified American family going "honey, you won't believe this, I opened the about page of the app, and it's from 'somewhere else'!"

Yeah no shit there's 97% of the world that's not American and they can actually make things. Americans are talking about TikTok as if they've just encountered their first batch of exotic spices travelling along the Silk Road.

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

That's a straw-man argument. Most people don't know nor care that TikTok is software made in China. The feds seem to care, but they're playing politics, and there is not much overlap with what Average American cares about.

treeman792• 6 years ago

Made by China is not such a big deal.

China having visibility on personal lives of most us Citizens is a bigger concern.

ignoramous• 6 years ago

Also, I don't think Americans somehow magically share common values. Most Americans I know would take that as an insult.

syshum3• 6 years ago

We used to, I am old enough to remember those days..

Sadly it seems the melting pot is gone, and been replaced with the Salad Bowl... and the Tomato's want to declare war on the Onions.....

robswc2• 6 years ago

I would wager that the average tiktok user would have no idea the app was developed in China if not for the current political tension surrounding the app. True, I'm sure most just assume its from the US (like most apps) but you'd probably just get an "oh, that's interesting" when telling someone it was "made in China."

Funny to imagine sure, however definitely exaggerated ahah.

xiaolingxiao• 6 years ago

Believe it or not they do thanks to trumps attempt at banning it. The love for tik tok is far above anything I’ve seen, more than IG. Grindr is also owned by Chinese company, but most people don’t know this one.

mathraki2• 6 years ago

As a European immigrant who came to the US to be an entrepreneur, I can tell you there are many reasons for the US leadership so far, many of which are still true. My top list:

- biggest unified market. This is HUGE. Not like the EU "unified" where you can't even speak the same language, but really unified. This means an early idea has big enough of a market to worth pursuing, among other things.

- a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk

- world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country

China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above.

If China was ever to become democratized and continue its growth trajectory it could truly challenge the US gobally but that may not happen for years or decades.

Overall I think we should welcome more innovation, even if the US has to share some of the leadership it had until now. But articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else.

cmehdy5• 6 years ago

China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and academic works coming out of China, while still facing issues in quality on average, have still been rising in quantity and quality.

When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually.

Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost.

I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate.

You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.

rottingfruit• 6 years ago

I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?

mathraki2• 6 years ago

A tradeoff that I find fascinating is that of democracy vs authoritarian gov't. It's the question of our days.

I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages:

- very efficient in redirecting resources as needed

- the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently

- no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges)

HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1])

So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%.

In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

divbzero• 6 years ago

You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.

Why not have both?

China should in no way have to be “Western” to be trusted internationally. But they could embrace the opportunity to be even more open and generous of a society than they have been in the recent past. They’re certainly strong enough for it.

A few things I would personally love to see:

– More transparent and consistent application of laws

– Celebrate and protect all Chinese of all diversities, not just the majority who hold the most power

– Avoid taking nationalism to an extreme

The second and third especially are serious mistakes other nations (e.g. Britain, Japan, America) have made in recent history. It would be a gift to see China avoid the same.

foobarian• 6 years ago

China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there

I feel that for at least the last century, you need to think of the US population for the purposes of talent pool sizing as more or less the entire world because of its focus on liberty and opportunity. Consider how many accomplished scientists and inventors came from other countries (including China) for this reason. The US has enjoyed a very privileged position of being able to skim the cream of the crop in this way.

booleandilemma• 6 years ago

Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there

I don’t think it works that way. We’re not talking about building pyramids, or a great wall. It’s not a simple labor issue or China and India would already be winning.

A corrupt authoritarian country can’t innovate at the speed of a free and democratic one.

AmericanChopper• 6 years ago

China, in its current form, simply doesn’t have the potential to compete with the US in this way. It is a walled garden of corruption, who’s leaders will go to any lengths to retain total control of.

Indian on the other hand, given enough time, could come to challenge the US’s economic domination.

MrYellowP3• 6 years ago

It's actually 850 million people.

"China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

I felt like 250 million people difference in accuracy was worth pointing out, but of course this also covers "600 million in the last decades".

free_rms4• 6 years ago

If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it. That's a way bigger deal than any (often overstated) difference in freedom or innovation.

wonnage2• 6 years ago

Chinese is not some mysterious language that nobody knows...

coldtea6• 6 years ago

If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it.

The world didn't know 3 words of French when that became dominant "linga franca", and din't know English when that replaced it, either.

People learn X's language because there's an advantage of knowing it and doing business with X, they don't do business with X because they speak their language.

The future language will probably just be some bastardization of English and Chinese, with some Spanish thrown in...

coldtea6• 6 years ago

China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above.

The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. The rest of Asia, Africa, Australia, and perhaps Latin America, wont have as many issues being led by China.

RestlessMind• 6 years ago

The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that.

US + Europe, along with other US aligned nations (Japan, Australia, NZ etc) account for >50% of the world GDP[1].

The rest of Asia ... wont have as many issues being led by China.

Any more details to back this assertion? Just a brief glance at the current geopolitical events reveal the following Asian countries having issues with China: Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. Some other are heavily aligned with the US (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, ...). A lot of these have significant populations and/or economies in Asia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

justicezyx2• 6 years ago

An EU immigrant commenting on US social and economy development, and equally assured of oneself of the same authority on China.

Chinese netizens have a sarcastic name for people with the tendency to comment on grandiose topics with some form of unfounded authority, who unfortunately dont have a long professional career as an academic researcher or as a long time practitioner of that area.

That name is called keyboard politicians, or 键盘政治家/键政

First as an immigrant, you are farm from the dynamism and inner working of the society. An EU immigrant is surely more informed than a Chinese one, but I would put both as largely blank paper compared to a native person.

For China... I left China 2008, and today I consider myself no fundamental difference when dealing with Chinese affairs than an American. Any one who had not lived in China for the past 4 decades, simply have no way to understand the unprecedented changes and the fundamentally different social dynamism in China.

In short, these statements might be true. But more likely to be wrong. And in the end, they not too far from from a gibberish produced by GPT-3 trained from randomly sampled web articles.

Good luck with the belief...

PestoDiRucola2• 6 years ago

So an immigrant cannot be as informed as a "native" based only on the fact that they were not born there? What sort of claim is this?

mellosouls• 6 years ago

a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk

Many other cultures have the same, perhaps to a lesser extent, but balanced in that regard (say) by more rights for workers or protection from corporate abuse or a higher quality of life.

world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country

Depends how you look at it - for example, per capita the UK has more Top 10 universities than the USA.

articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else

It's important to take a balanced view on these things; a US decline is probably simplistic as you indicate - but a rose-tinted view of it is just as unhelpful.

bleepblorp• 6 years ago

A society the size of the US has a huge amount of inertia and fears over imminent US loss of global status are overblown. However, the US does have several serious structural problems that will eventually threaten its global position if they are not addressed.

You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded.

Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure.

While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible.

Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale.

It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities.

The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done.

cutemonster• 6 years ago

a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk

Sounds as if you've found a bubble and mistake it good being the general population.

Therere similar bubbles (even whole cities maybe I could say) with many startup people and innovative culture outside the US too, eg here where I live

biggest unified market

Good point, thanks for writing

sbmthakur• 6 years ago

I share this sentiment. Another important point is that the US still manages to be a center for education and entertainment for most of the world. While China is attracting more students and artists, the barrier of language still remains as China's majority of institutions essentially cater to the domestic market.

tompic823• 6 years ago

I enjoyed this article's perspective, particularly its mention of Apple and California acting as the US's de facto privacy regulators. There is one line I don't understand though:

Second, you can no longer assume that the important companies and products themselves are American. Both of these are captured in Tiktok.

Is Tiktok an "important" service? I may very well be out of touch, but a social media app used primarily by teenagers to share trendy videos doesn't seem all that important to me. It's important in the sense that it's shaping regulation, but I don't believe that's what the author is referring to when using the word.

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

Hm, isn't it the other way around? In the 90s, the technologies that made the internet boom were things like Linux, Mysql, php, which were created in europe (with great US contributions). . Google wouldn't be able to commoditize its search so easily otherwise. US companies were (and are) great at consumer-facing tec. It's in the past decade+ that the US has become dominant in just about everything tech (largely because of the cloud and mobile). It has also become excessively dominant in the media (outside china), so dominant and centralized that american outrages end up becoming global outrages. When was the last time we saw twitter trends coming from outside the US? There is a war going in on armenia, yet overshadowed by a US debate (before potus got covid, which overshadows tonight's alien invasion). All operating systems that have substantial user base are now made in US.

Even the TikTok case is telling. Many european countries do not wish to have bad relations with china, or don't see them as a threat, yet they 'll follow suit in banning it.

I think it's the other way around. There is too much americano-centrism in the internet now, and that s a problem because it's being filled with increasingly more numerous and more rigid american rules (gone is piracy, subscriptions for everything, app stores, gatekeepers everywhere). This is a culture that is not fun, and consumers will take note. TikTok is probably just the beginning of people searching for new toys outside america's walled garden.

giantrobot2• 6 years ago

The Internet boom of the 90s up to the dot com crash was powered primarily by the big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco, Sun, SGI, and Oracle. Linux and the greater LAMP stack didn't become dominant until after the dot com crash. Even then a significant amount of FOSS money/contributions were coming from US companies. Also keep in mind the P in LAMP really meant both Perl and PHP.

I'm also really curious when exactly you think popular (in terms of users) operating systems for computers didn't come from the US. Symbian and BlackBerry OS are the only two coming to mind and neither were general purpose OSes.

As for American-centric Internet...wow. Piracy is still a thing. Subscriptions are a revenue model in no way unique or specific to the US. Web browsers still exist so I don't see how "app stores" did anything to make the Internet American-centric. Those same web browsers can access websites with no gatekeeping unless you live in an authoritarian state that does gatekeeping for you. Describing the Internet as an American walled garden is, to be charitable, absolutely ridiculous and borderline stupid.

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

Yes of course, LAMP wasnt the only technology, but it was at least one of them that the rest of the world had some influence in. I didnt say they were popular, but linux and nokia OSs had a substantial user base, and they could act as alternatives.

The internet's overton window is almost 100% defined by the US. The cultural norms, free speech norms, cryptocurrency norms, comedy norms, nudity norms, all are filtered by US companies, and the US acts as a relay for just about anything that goes on in the internet. Only russia and china have enclaves with internet cultures that deviate from internet orthodoxy.

csb6• 6 years ago

This is a very American-centric view of things. The author insists that the Internet has up until recently been mostly American, yet admits that the World Wide Web was made in Switzerland. And about most Internet users being American...does the author think Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia first got connected to the internet in like 2012 or something? In the very early days, yes, the Internet was largely in the U.S., but the Internet has been worldwide for a long time, with large amounts of users outside the U.S. The graph presenting the amount of VC money spent in the U.S. vs. abroad makes me think that the author views “the Internet” as tech startups in the Silicon Valley tradition and not anything else. There is a lot more to the Internet than Google and Yahoo and Facebook and friends. American users might not see these parts of the Internet, but they exist and existed. Just because they weren't a hot new SV startup doesn't mean they weren't a valuable and popular component of the Internet. Other countries besides the U.S. have had large, popular sites and apps for decades.

Udik• 6 years ago

The point is that the widely used services and applications in the US are either from the US or from countries that are safely within the US's sphere of influence. TikTok is an exception as it comes from a country that is as much outside the US's sphere of influence as the US is outside the sphere of influence of European countries (or of any other country in the world).

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

[TikTok] is the first time that Americans have really had to deal with their teenagers using a form of mass media that isn’t created in their country by people who mostly share their values. It’s from somewhere else.

I wonder how much Vine influenced TikTok/Musical.ly, and if Vine's timing was bad, or if Twitter just really dropped the ball.

DLay• 6 years ago

Twitter was struggling financially at that time and didn’t have the billions of dollars Bytedance has burned through to reach scale.

The End of the American Internet

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