First, as usually is the case for States /Federations nomenclature as well as Communist Parties, adjective (Communist) goes first, name of the country goes in the end and noon (i.e. Party), goes in the middle. Thus CPC not CCP.
Interesting, since all the Chinese immigrants I speak to here abbreviate it "CCP", as does one of the linked articles below. But you're obviously closer to the source than I am.
Another misconception, which is quite important is that ByteDance is a private company. It's not China. Same as Google is not US.
I hope you're not trying to claim that a so-called "private" company in China operates with full independence from the government and the Communist Party in the same way that a private company in the U.S. does. China
regularly "disappears" domestic businessmen who are too successful, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. The threat there is always implicit. Foreign companies who want to do business in China are required to partner with a domestic company in a joint venture where the domestic company retains >50% ownership (gee, I wonder why). The Chinese government
actively steals IP from foreign companies through cyberattacks while their domestic "private" partners in crime have
institutionalized stealing IP from foreign clients and joint venture "partners". And let's not get started on all the bribes and kickbacks going between so-called "private" companies and the Communist Party.
In a totalitarian country there is no meaningful separation between "private" companies and the state. The government will leave them alone until they want something from them or want to teach them a lesson for getting too uppity, and then the company will bend over and do the party's will. Surely you're not naive enough to argue otherwise...?
Treating the App TikTok, which operates separately and more in line with liberal international standards than Douyin, as a direct government agent has some base, but it's not fair. Similar albeit not in same league of gravity, treating Google as if they were direct US agents it wouldn't be fair.
As you yourself state, this is not in the "same league of gravity", so calling it similar is disingenuous. If the U.S. government oversteps, Google can sue them -- and in the United States, where the judiciary is a separate and co-equal branch of government, a law suit can actually stop the government from imposing its will. Apple has resisted attempts at executive branch intrusion and has been largely successful. PRISM is obviously a huge black eye in this area for the U.S., but it currently has at least 4 law suits open against it, and eventually justice will be done, even if it comes slowly. Clearly there would be no comparable checks and balances on the Chinese side if the government or the party wanted Bytedance to do something for them.
I have zero doubts that Google will sometimes act as an agent in case of war.
You have a point here, and as I've acknowledged elsewhere, it would be entirely reasonable for foreign governments to be skeptical and err on the side of overregulating what information U.S. companies are allowed to collect and what they're allowed to do with it. Europe's GDPR is the sensible response to this.
Third, US is not in war with China even if it acts as if this is inevitable and unnecessarily escalates the tensions, i.e. Officials visiting Taiwan month in month out lately, AUKUS, Philippines, up the game with Japan, South Korea.
China regularly takes aggressive action against the west in every area outside of overt military aggression (and occasionally they toy with that too in the Taiwan strait). This is the literal definition of a cold war, and China is the primary aggressor. This has been the explicitly
internally-declared strategy of the party since at least 1999. Ignoring this truth is foolish.
They repeatedly
warn China via EU not to sell arms to Russia and same time they up their game of selling arms to Taiwan!!
Just for the record, US
officially declares that "we do not support Taiwan independence" and "and we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means."
Yes, but you conveniently ignore everything else in the statement you just linked to. The U.S. is committed
by law to the defense of Taiwan and the prevention of any non-peaceful means of reunification with the mainland. The One China policy is performance art -- a formal stance required by the PRC to have normalized relations with them. So while we formally acknowledge only one China, the PRC, we still have a de facto embassy in Taiwan (we just call it the "American Institute In Taiwan"), we still have informal diplomatic relations with the Taiwanese government, and we are still committed to their defense, both in material and in deed.
Russia is trying to reintroduce imperialism into Europe, destabilizing the region and the world economy in the process. If China throws in with them, we're potentially looking at the development of an explicit axis of Russia/China/Iran/North Korea against the western world, with south Asia and Africa being used as pawns by both sides. This would be terrible for everyone. Also, if Putin is allowed to retain any Ukrainian land at the end of the war, this sets a terrible precedent for China to invade Taiwan.
Right now the west's response to Putin is giving China a preview of what will happen to them if they try to take Taiwan; but it would actually be markedly worse in China's case, because American forces will absolutely come to the defense of the island, and the moment China attacks American forces they're at war with all of NATO and the U.S.'s Pacific allies. If that doesn't count as WWIII, I'm not sure what would.
All the above is to say, that yes, TikTok must be fixed, but must be fixed right, as there's no such urgency, or shouldn't be.
Why is there no urgency? Every day China is maturing their total information awareness system with all the data they harvest from WeChat, the Great Firewall, facial templates from ID cards, visas, and TikTok, ubiquitous "security" cameras, and what have you. There's no domestic regulation preventing them from fully abusing that information to build profiles of every person that has contacted their web of information and using that to pursue their goals through bullying and intimidation, be it through
secret police stations in foreign countries,
threats made to China-based families of foreign members of government, or using personal information to more successfully
target foreigners of interest with sex spies.
The faucet is on, and the water bill is only going up. Why wait to stop the flow when you already know what's happening?
Tensions with China are generated largely from US who seem to be rushing into a conflict like if there's no tomorrow.
This is an astonishingly misinformed comment. Read
Unrestricted Warfare and peruse any number of "
wolf warrior diplomacy" comments coming from China over the past several years and try to say that again with a straight face. The U.S. is just calling out what every free world government already
knows China is doing.
You made your argument based on urgency, when there's none. The "urgency" it's artificial, mostly created by US for reasons that I don't understand at all.
Detailed information on 1/3 of an entire generation of Americans is being collected by a company under the thumb of an aggressive, totalitarian foreign power who has repeatedly shown gleeful motivation to use that sort of information to attack the U.S. non-militarily. They have already used this power to surveil foreign journalists, and they can also potentially use it to assert influence on the opinions of 1/3 of young adults in this country. This is an obvious imminent threat. What part of that do you still fail to understand?
If China were so imminent threat Biden should go easy on Putin and try to bring him on his side instead of adding fuel by calling him names 4 months into his presidency.
Nonsense. Putin's actions in Ukraine are both an immediate military and economic threat to the west, and a canary in the coal mine for Xi's ambitions vs. Taiwan. If you appease Putin you also embolden Xi. And an emboldened Xi will start WWIII by invading Taiwan.
TikTok must be fixed correctly and that is with a set of rules to apply to everyone. US is supposed to be supportive of free markets and not an autocratic state. Those things matter. And targeting a specific company in a supposed free market can be as damaging as abusing their position with dollar and freezing (even seizing!) Russian assets.
Free markets, yes. Anarchic markets, no. The genesis of U.S. antitrust law in the late 1890s came from rampant corruption, collusion, and cornering of overly free markets, and was drafted with specific companies in mind. Though yes, it was drafted as general rules, which is the way things should ideally be done, and the way things should always be done for the long term.
what other way there is to doing that other than apply set of rules to apply to all companies, foreign and domestic? Because don't forget that if they target foreign companies then they damage the freedom of the Market which is a cornerstone in defining US to themselves and the world.
Domestic companies are fully governed by domestic law. Foreign companies operating in the U.S. are only partially governed by domestic law. TikTok is a perfect example of this, where the U.S. subsidiary can feign ignorance and claim they're doing everything by the book, but the long arm of the PRC can reach in and take data or exert influence any way they choose, and the U.S. can't realistically prevent that from happening as long as the subsidiary shares ties to China. When a domestic subsidiary of a company starts acting like an aggressive foreign agent, it's not in any way unreasonable to address that directly.
If by common rules you mean also handling the case where a fully domestic company is somehow being overtly influenced by an adversarial foreign power, then sure, I would support that.
6th January 2021 which provided the playbook how to defunct US democracy in the future, partially happened due to spying features (i.e. targeting algorithms) in social media. See, if you don't fix it right the enemy can appear also from within.
I do agree that the U.S. needs to have a reckoning with our domestic social media companies over what data is collected, how it's used, and what the demonstrable social impact of their content delivery systems has been. This is also relevant to the recent proliferation of machine-learned algorithms in many other arenas, where no one even has any visibility into how they're making their decisions, because they essentially outsourced the stat crunching to the machine and said "make it work, I don't care how". But that requires a level of technical savvy that most people over 60 just don't have, and it's hard to motivate younger people to run for office because politics is such a horribly shitty business that most sane people want nothing to do with it.
In fairness to the tech companies, there probably weren't a whole lot of people thinking that their little slice of the internet could have such broad negative cultural effects in the early going, and it does take years for enough evidence and study to pile up to be able to draw reasonable conclusions about things. But given all the creepy anecdotes about
Facebook actively listening to your conversations even when it's not "on", etc., there are obviously some shenanigans going on there, and once proof emerges via a whistleblower there will be huge law suits, and years later, some consequences.
Limiting what companies can collect and what they can do with personal data does make good sense. Regulating how certain algorithms are allowed to work when they're applied toward things that could carry significant risk would also make good sense. But regardless of what the western countries do, China will still be collecting every scrap of information they can find and looking for ways to exploit it without any of those same kinds of safeguards in place. And we all need to worry about where that leads.
