ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off Between shutting down or selling TikTok, owner ByteDance would prefer doing the former. This according to Reuters, which cites four sources. ByteDance's worst-case-scenario decision comes after President Joe Biden signed a bill forcing TikTok's Chinese parent to either sell the social media platform to an entity that satisfies …
now there's something that would *really* worry me: a VPN under control company beholden to please the CCP rulers.
As an aside: accessing TikTok via VPN isn't really an option as the *app* will be banned from Apple's and Google's stores. On Android you _can_ still install stuff from other app stores but it's likely not enough to wean american teens off their iAddiction.
Won't matter. Web app would be easier.
I mean, the ban is unconstitutional anyway, so it's not actually going to happen. But it would be incredibly easy for them to work around it, it's not like web sites get blocked in the US. I mean, thepiratebay.org still works here, you don't even have to use a proxy site.
《the US only provides a quarter of TikTok's global revenue,》
I would not mind even 1% of an "only" like that. A nice little earner as Arthur Daley might have said.
If the residual 75% of revenue is generated by the 95% who are non-US tiktok users, I would guess the vast majority of such users aren't generating revenue at all (the opposite.)
I wonder how many of those tiktok users that do generate revenue (having some disposable income) do so under the influence of the illusion of a first world lifestyle portrayed by the US tiktok users? A dilemma there. :)
As long as they're consistent about it but I suspect it's just the usual dangerous mix of isolatianism and an attempt to abuse law via unproven allegations (or attempts at diverting the attention from the questionable activities of their own companies, take your pick) to try and grab a slice of the profits.
Plus ça change, plus c'st la même merde (slightly reality adjusted French saying :) )
The "Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of China" requires all Chinese companies give unfettered access to the CCP. (Chapter 1, Articles 1 & 2) “数据开发利用” is translated as “data development and use.” The term “development” carries the sense of developing or exploiting a natural resource, and some people translate it as “data exploitation and use.”
I agree. They'll probably sell at the last minute to some fella in a non-Western country. Burma or Vietnam perhaps? Or Russia?
Of course they risk the company becoming worthless if it's banned regardless, which may very well be the case if Uncle Sam is displeased.
I guess the real question is whether the EU will follow through on this and push for a divestiture too. I'm pretty sure that losing Europe too would severely impact ByteDance's financials. I'm not sure it would sink the company (China is large enough to support it) but it's hopes of dominating the world would be foundered.
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I don't think the downwards angle of that IQ curve is fixable - it would simply give them more time to complain about other self inflicted problems.
This is what you get when you destroy an educational system - it may help some politicians but you put a nation on a downwards spiral into abject stupidity.
I'd say it's evidence of a lowering standard in commenting that this didn't resulted in a quick email to corrections@ instead.
But hey, let's complain instead of helping out.
The people who write these articles is are still mostly human as far as I know*
* essential caveat :)
Another win for the world police.
"We can't allow them to have this kind of power" they say as they issue a mafia style *pay up or leave town*. The hypocrisy.
With idiocy like this in charge we truly are fucked as a species.
I am well tired of this blood from a stone crap, either just declare war on China already or bend over for a good pinging. The longer this fucking around back and forward carries on the worse the average people lose out. Just have it out already, maybe the average person will benefit from the crossfire.
Without change in China's leadership it is not possible to avoid, Xi Jinping is very much a shoot the messenger type of person. He had his old mentor dragged out of the CCP's annual conference live on television recently. He has committed China to a path of going to war to capture Taiwan and nobody is willing to tell him that this is a bad idea.
As copied from my notes of importance file:
> A revision to a clause concerning the Chinese President and Vice President's
terms of office was also incorporated. "It is a key measure to improve the
state leadership system," Shen told the conference.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03/11/c_137032165.htm
Simply put, our only hope is that China's build up to being ready for war takes so long that they suddenly discover they don't have enough citizens of army age to throw into the fight.
Deleterious demographics defending democracy?
Xi is many things but he has not committed China to any war. The chinese like fake everything they will not be invading Taiwan for a long time, they know their equipment is all show and basically garbage, after all half of it is produced under license from Russia. Nobody has had their investment shown to be utter garbage as much as the chinese by the Ukraine invasion.
The chinese are very patiented they waited a long time for HK and 500 years for Macau and they will wait for Taiwan rather than losing face.
That's exactly my thinking. I don't see humanity changing its course without the demonstration that the course they are on leads to millions dead.
Its horrific, but it is very clearly their endpoint. They keep poking each other. Goading each other into more aggressive stances.
We can have no certainty about our own countries governance as long as our own governments are more concerned about the goings 9n in other countries.
Just just get it over with. We are on the slide down the slope to it, with no brakes or reverse gear to be seen. Politics is no l9nger about caring for your own people, its about fear of others. And its sad to see. I know where this ends, the world has been through it countless times.
Fear, distrust, anger and then action... As predictable as the tides, and playing out in front of us but no one wants to do anything about it but make it worse.
Whereas You Tube either uses ML or outsources, often overseas, much of the human work, Tik Tok does it in China with domestic labor, at about 1/8 of the cost of US Labor, and with great attention to detail. Why? For starters, China has strong content regulation - i.e., it has to monitored for political slant. ML can't judge that, so it has to be humans. While doing that, those same workers can be moulding content to get the zippity-zip of compulsive, (admittedly shallow) flow which is Tik Tok's trademark. Tik Tok couldn't even sell that if they wanted to. No company in the US will be able to re create it.
> Tik Tok couldn't even sell that if they wanted to. No company in the US will be able to re create it.
In that case, TikTok should put that description of their algorithm[1] into a very large & thick envelope, clearly labeled "Secret Algorithm, Buyer's Eyes Only", then sell it to as many US buyers as they can: easy money and no fear of being outperformed by the competition.
[1] it is still an algorithm, no need for scare quotes, even if it isn't performed by a computer
"Could ByteDance set up a shell company (or chain of such companies) to "buy" Tik Tok while still effectively retaining ownership (and the income) thereby thumbing their noses at the US government?"
Sure, why not. Set up in Mexico, I'm sure Mexico would love the tax revenue. Profits could be used to set up manufacturing of EV's for a Chinese parent with equity funneled back to ByteDance in the form of stock or as a straight loan. Continued profits could expand the footprint of the new manufacturing center as has been done in a couple of places in Mexico by Chinese investors already. It not only blurs the ownership, it takes advantage of North American trade agreements. These will be Mexican companies, they'd just have a lot of stock ownership out of China.
"US only provides a quarter of TikTok's global revenue"? Why, we are the richest and most powerful country, we are more important than just a quarter of anyone's revenue! We got to keep TikTok and prove we can spend more on it than anyone else!
Yeah, it's good thing Biden started Operation Warp Speed and got those vaccines developed, eh?
Oh wait, Trump did that, didn't he? If you recieved a vaccine, make sure to thank Trump for it!
I wonder how far and fast it wouldn't have spread had Congressional Democrats not sued every time Trump tried to close the borders, calling it racist, just to turn around and say that if Trump had closed the borders at the outset we wouldn't have been hit so hard?
Go on, thumb me down you leftists bastards, you know you want to!
> Yeah, it's good thing Biden started Operation Warp Speed and got those vaccines developed, eh?
Huh? Biden in power 2021, vaccines arrive in 2020, so - sneer at Biden for not being in office early enough? Hey, Trump wasn't in office to win the battle at Midway, guess we can sneer at him for that!
> If you recieved a vaccine, make sure to thank Trump for it!
Nah, would rather thank all the people who, you know, actually worked to figure it out, make it, stick the needles in people.
It doesn't matter one teeny, tiny, little bit whose ass was warming the oval office chair, they were not the ones doing any of the work on the vaccine. Hey, guess what, it wasn't even all done in the US.
So... the US is happy to have the CLOUD Act and use data on other peoples shores, but when another country has the possibility of doing it... BanHammer Time.
WE should make Microsoft etc. start divesting so we can avoid the CLOUD
Well... we should do that anyway (avoid the cloud).
But no, this is about the US doing to a Chinese company, which the CCP does to all foreign companies in China. Must have Chinese presence, Chinese ownership, or not China biz for you. The ones that say "no" get banned e.g. Facebook. Not that Chinese citizens are losing out from a Facebook ban, but it's the exact same thing as the US has just done to TT.
The Washington Post has an article detailing the kinds of problems the Federal government would have in trying to force the sale. Its worth reading to get a bit of a roadmap for the future. This is the third attempt to ban this application, the previous two (by the Trump administration and the state of Montana) failed in the courts. The new law is written to try and avoid the legal pitfalls of the other two but its still on very dicey ground (because much as our legislators might like it to be so just because they say 'jump' doesn't necessarily mean everyone has to stop what they're doing and leap into the air).
It also remarks at the end that one reason for delaying its implementation till after the election is that politicians are using it. That includes Joe Biden's campaign.
Let them shut it down and see hundreds of billions of dollars of stock valuation go up in smoke!
What really bothers me is that Chinese companies can expect a fair trial in our courts whilst our companies have no such luxury in China. I propose we limit the rights of companies which are located in countries where democracy is non-existent or deficient.
I do wonder if the EU will have the GUTS to pull something like this. Me thinks not.
What really bothers me is that Chinese companies can expect a fair trial in our courts whilst our companies have no such luxury in China.
They ALSO expect the USA to honor their patents and other intellectual property, while REGULARLY violating our patents etc. for "Domestic Only" distribution.
I understand TickTickBOOM has some built in video editing tools that are covered by SOFTWARE PATENTS. Let's just violate them with a U.S. developed competing product and be done with it.
>>> "There is a fear stateside that China-based ByteDance could be forced by Middle Kingdom mandarins to manipulate TikTok, one of the biggest social media platforms in the United States, to spread misinformation or snoop on Americans. " <<<
So, when the ban on Truth Social, ONN, Fox, Newsmax... ?
Its because the whole point of Tiktok is to facilitate spying and blackmail. If they can't use it for that then its worthless to them ... They will just buy or build another platform for spying and blackmail. They did it once before by purchasing grindr ..
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