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.
Anyways, an insteresting case study for platform theory ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
They probably will retaliate on American entertainment/content, considering those are more replaceable.
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?
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.
