“Can we ban iPhone in retaliation?” Chinese internet reacts to TikTok hearing

https://thechinaproject.com/2023/03/24/can-we-ban-iphone-in-retaliation-chinese-internet-reacts-to-tiktok-hearing-in-the-u-s/

by throwaway4good • 3 years ago

24 63 3 years ago

thechinaproject.com

abudabi123• 3 years ago

”Have the Communist Party grill the Apple C.E.O?“ in response to the TikTok C.E.O.'s grilling.

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

I suspect that's already been done a few times - but the CCP did not want a public spectacle, and the US Congress did.

meltyness4• 3 years ago

6 hours of testimony that, at most, 2-3% of the country even glanced at is a spectacle in your eyes?

This looks like splitting, or you're deliberately failing to understand how lawmaking works and the importance of making informed decisions at the federal level, in the long term.

Congress constantly grills CEOs, the elite, and victims because it is understood that they reshape society, sometimes for the worse, not always on purpose.

Is a law needed? How do we tax it? Who is being harmed? What is the harm? Can a law be enforced?

The transparency is by default. Not a "spectacle".

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

s '/ban iPhone/ban Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/' seems more reasonable.

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

Aren't all those things already blocked/banned in China? (since 2009).

(I feel like a joke might be wooshing over my head here).

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

Yes.

(Yeah, I was taking a stab at a more-complex joke. A bit about the hypocrisy of the Chinese position, but mostly about how narrow and simplistic the Congress and western news media seem to be on this issue. Or perhaps America's social media giants have "incentivized" our politicians and press to keep them out of it?)

throwaway4good2• 3 years ago

Google and Facebook had the option of operating in China under conditions somewhat similar to TikTok’s project Texas: servers in China, operating under local laws, supporting authorities in surveillance and censorship.

Apple and Microsoft operate services under those conditions in China.

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

What's wild is that, they don't even have TikTok in China.

turbobooster• 3 years ago

Douyin basically

favaq3• 3 years ago

Of course they do. It's got another name (抖音) but it's basically the same exact product.

eutropia• 3 years ago

it’s the same product but they only allow educational content and stuff that promotes Chinese hegemony.

They let the rest of the world have nyquil chicken.

propogandist• 3 years ago

Owning an iPhone shows the owner has privilege to overpay for commodity hardware, manufactured in their backyard; no one will give it up.

ChuckNorris89• 3 years ago

Owning an iPhone shows the owner has privilege to overpay for commodity hardware

Huawei/Xiaomi flagships cost as much as an iPhone.

sturza• 3 years ago

How many other iPhone owners know that?

John23832• 3 years ago

Wouldn’t that be a tacit admission of the closeness, or importance, of TikTok to China… something TikTok/Bytedance is explicit trying not to do? They’re trying to up play the distance.

rat99882• 3 years ago

No. The official discourse is that tiktok ban comes from a security point of view, and not economic war. No one buys it though, at least not oversea.

Symbiote• 3 years ago

Which overseas? Several European countries are seeing TikTok banned in government, large businesses etc.

WastingMyTime893• 3 years ago

That would just be tit-for-tat market restrictions. From a third party point of view, the whole situation is hilarious. Especially seeing the USA trying to argue Chinese products are a significant risk regarding spying after Snowden.

ethbr03• 3 years ago

This gets tossed out, but didn't Snowden literally prove they weren't the same?

In that the NSA had to tap backhaul links because they couldn't simply order Google to turn over Gmail data.

And was trawling internet traffic flows because it couldn't get the data it wanted from the providers themselves.

If you have an easy button... you use it. You don't accomplish secret and expensive engineering miracles just for the hell of it. Especially not with government budgets.

LinuxBender3• 3 years ago

China says they oppose the push to force a sale of TikTok. [1] I do not know what to read into that.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/china-opposes-tiktok-sal...

aa-jv3• 3 years ago

I'm just waiting for someone to make an open-source TikTok analog that can just replace the functionality with a platform not controlled by a single party .. we still have that dream right, cryptonerds?

Seems like the best solution to the problem.

favaq3• 3 years ago

Who's going to pay for that? Not only the software, but the video hosting, transcoding, etc.

And don't tell me you can do it with p2p - the entire point of tiktok is that you can load new videos by swiping your finger. If every video takes 10 seconds to begin buffering nobody will want to use your app.

aa-jv3• 3 years ago

I heard these same arguments about the Linux kernel, back in the days before it came along and ate everyones' lunch.

This app can be built, quite easily, by anyone motivated to do so. Just like the kernel, just like a distribution vendor, just like any one of the thousands of highly successful open source, community-oriented projects out there.

LinuxBender3• 3 years ago

There are quite a few open source platforms that could be modified to technically replace TikTok. Peertube could probably be forked or modified to fill that gap. I do not believe that is the obstacle. Running a massive site like that is incredibly expensive, requires a lot of employees, servers, bandwidth, geographic locations, moderators and more moderators. Then there would be the fun that comes with creating a competing site to TikTok, dealing with all its followers and anyone that has a vested interest in TikTok especially when the alternative gains any popularity.

The only open source case I can think of that has some success is Mastodon and that is because it's creators let people launch their own mini communities but that is a different social model all together, probably closer to self hosted forums with a different UX/UI. TikTok's success comes from the centralized discoverability and its algorithms. Mastodon on the other hand is a fenced garden. Almost anyone can walk through the garden gate but AFAIK there is not a centralized search function for full discoverability.

aa-jv3• 3 years ago

I'd wager its just a matter of time until someone gloms a front-end to Mastodon that will do all the transcoding/transfer magic required to produce the same functionality. Lets see ..

sys_647382• 3 years ago

Who is going to pay for that storage for all these crappy videos? It has to be stored somewhere which costs $$$. No open source solution will ever gain critical mass due to that.

Overtonwindow3• 3 years ago

Funny, but they won't. TikTok isn't going anywhere. There's too much money involved, not to mention constitutional rights and law. China won't ban the iPhone because they love it too much and they can't make something better.

All of this is a complete waste of time.

ashwagary3• 3 years ago

China won't ban the iPhone because they love it too much and they can't make something better.

Incorrect, there are many iPhone substitutes.

Overtonwindow3• 3 years ago

The iPhone is the best selling smart phone in the world. There may be other phones, but Chinese people are buying iPhones over their own domestic brands.

DiogenesKynikos2• 3 years ago

they can't make something better.

Before the US sanctioned Huawei, Huawei's flagship phones were better than the iPhone (assuming you can tolerate Android).

Sanctions dealt a heavy blow to Huawei, but there are other Chinese smartphone manufacturers that make very good flagships now.

schuke3• 3 years ago

Hasn't China been preemptively retaliating since 2000? Among FAANG only Apple still works. And FANG is actually the surname of the father of the Great Firewall. (Fang Binxing)

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

Not really, they either pulled out or got banned because they wouldn't remove content that broke Chinese law, any Chinese company who did the same would also be banned.

Tiktok hasn't broken any American laws that result in more than fine.

schuke3• 3 years ago

No. 1. China's constitution protects free speech. Rendering many 'laws' unconstitutional. This may be too philosophical, so there is 2. Many 'laws' are intentionally vague so their application can be as arbitrary as possible: anything can 'disturb public order' or 'violate social morale'. Who's to decide? Of course it's the Party, not the law. 3. If you look carefully, even those catch-all regulations aren't there in many cases. Chen Yun, one of the Deng Xiaoping-era elders famously argued against making a News Law, saying "When the KMT was in power, we [the Communists] studied their news laws very carefully and exploited loopholes. Now that we're in power, it's better there is no law at all." In China, laws are "made strictly, violated widely, and enforced selectively." This is the real world Constitution.

EE84M3i• 3 years ago

Among FAANG only Apple still works.

Hmm, is this true?

Amazon has amazon.cn still running as far as I know, and supports china regions in the aws-cn partition via separate companies that "operate" the regions for them.

As far as I know, meta and Google don't operate their normal services in china, but I thought they still had offices there, which presumably do something.

schuke3• 3 years ago

The business that Amazon, Facebook, Google have in China is tiny relative to their size. Amazon has a few machine-translated pages that relay their US, UK, DE, JP sites' goods to China. Kindle's shut down. FB & Google sell some ads to local exporters.

roenxi• 3 years ago

One company or product isn't going to be that important in the long run.

What is more concerning here is if the US is being out-competed to the point where they have to take legislative action. If they make a habit of that, it means that they are making some deep mistakes in their regulatory structure. The Chinese managed to do something here that the EU, Africa and India didn't manage.

Traditionally (eg, vs the USSR) America went in with a strong corporate and social base that took the expectations off the Fine Minds in Government. If it comes down to US bureaucrats vs Chinese bureaucrats my money is on the Chinese, their government is more internally coherent. The US needs competitive corporations.

giraffe_lady• 3 years ago

Why are you assuming that US tech companies being out competed is necessarily due to US regulation? Maybe they just fucked up and lost the all-important youth attention market on their own. I don't see any reason to think something other than that actually.

0dayz• 3 years ago

Tiktok success is literally the result of vine shutting down.

Mizoguchi2• 3 years ago

“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said

I mean, we are talking about a regime that kidnaps world famous artists, olympic athletes and business tycoons and dissappear them for months if they ever dare to challenge or disobey the Chinese Communist Party in any way or form.

Just imagine if in the US the goverment kidnaps Serena Williams, Jennifer Lawrence or Tim Cook and puts them out for a long time and when they return they are so terrified to say anything that getting any information about their whereabouts is practically impossible.

This is how the CCP operates and controls enterprises and the general population.

The CEO of Bytedance knows this and knew it when he took the job.

So now coming to say under oath that Bytedance is not an agent of the CCP, when Chew himself is at the very top of the watch list of the regime is not only perjury but just plain ridiculous.

akmarinov• 3 years ago

You can ban Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Oh, wait…

sys_647382• 3 years ago

There's definitely a lot of behind the scenes lobbying from American internet companies against Tik Tok as they can't control what they don't own. They also can't buy it as it's a China company. I still don't see why Tik Tok is any worse than kids being brainwashed with American social media or ad companies. Zuck is as much a devil as the villians in the Communist Chinese Government.

“Can we ban iPhone in retaliation?” Chinese internet reacts to TikTok hearing

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