Hacker News Reader

Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

personally, I think the way to deal with this is the way the Chinese have done it (very successfully)

if US "gatekeepers" wish to operate in the European market, it will be under license, with a joint venture that is majority controlled by European shareholders, with technology transfer agreements

essentially: using their own greed against them

and if they don't like it, they can operate somewhere else

View on HN

The only countries that do this in the world are China and Iran. Russia and India do it partially, such as rules for storing data domestically so they can snoop on it.

Apple has a company called GCBD running their iCloud so the Chinese gov can access it https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Google, LinkedIn, Uber, etc left China. Meta refused to do a joint venture so never entered the market. The only big American names who did a joint venture were Apple and Tesl

TikTok?

There is no law in America requiring domestic joint ventures.

The Tiktok law gives the US gov power to ban social media companies controlled by a "U.S. foreign adversary" (only 6 countries) and offers the chance for divestment, but doesn't require moving operations to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...

You cant have this without a great firewall.

firewall not needed, just need to remove the way for US companies to make money from advertising in Europe.

as long as ads money gravy train to USA is stopped, USA companies will leave themselves / or comply

How do you stop Europeans from accessing the services?

You stop the firms from getting paid, not Europeans from accessing those services.

They'll very quickly figure out how to become compliant.

If a service cant operate in Europe what incentive is there to comply with EU regulation?

Money (which also "enables" compliance)

The context of this is considering requiring companies to pay/acquire a licence to operate in the EU; if a company isn't willing to abide the terms of the license, not operating in the EU is the whole point.

> The context of this is considering requiring companies to pay/acquire a licence to operate in the EU

And if they dont, you have to block the service.

As mentioned elsewhere, no you don't; you block the companies from being paid for providing the service. It's up to the companies to deal with it then.

In most cases the company isnt paid by the end EU user. They can still serve ads to EU users.

Say Google doesnt play ball with the EU and the EU disallows them from operating in the EU. EU user visits a search page and sees an ad. This ad comes from some company outside the EU. The EU user can access Google and Google gets paid. How do you stop the EU user from accessing Google.

>>some company outside the EU

its not relevant, what really is important is Googel/FB siphoning money away from EU companies that pay for ads.

This is the source of high valuation of ad driven US businesses: ability to siphon money from businesses around the world simply for showing an ad. Check "Google Tax" if you are familiar with this term

Stop that pipeline and big tech will comply

> In most cases the company isnt paid by the end EU user. They can still serve ads to EU users.

You still don't need to specifically block either the EU user or Google's payment for that ad view.

To continue with the example, if the EU secures judgement that Google is not stopping services & refuses to abide licensing requirements, other assets Google has within the EU's jurisdiction can be at risk.

If a tech company operates in a jurisdiction against their laws, ultimately they would have to make sure they have nothing that can be taken from them there.

>To continue with the example, if the EU secures judgement that Google is not stopping services & refuses to abide licensing requirements, other assets Google has within the EU's jurisdiction can be at risk.

But Google is already not operating within the EU in this scenario. Google says "no thanks we dont want to play by your rules" yet google.com still exists and EU users can access it. That's why you have to block it, along with anyone else that doesn't go along with the proposed forced tech transfer to a domestic company. Or you dont block it and you arent enforcing the proposed rule.

I don't think you're aware of just how much Google has at risk in the EU; it's in the billions.

They could take the hit, but that's not "we don't like a rule, so we're walking away" money.

accessing service is a cost center, no need to block service.

The revenue stream is European companies paying US companies for ads (or rather European firms paying Irish/Dutch subsidiaries of Gogel/Insta/FB for ads).

Ads would still be served though. You don’t need European companies for that.

You absolutely can, because the companies providing tech services need to get paid, either from local companies buying ad space, or directly from their users, and you can just block payment to non-compliant firms.

Given America's hostile stance to its former allies, joint ownership and technology transfer agreements as a condition for its firms operating in the EU market sounds more than reasonable. If US firms aren't happy with this, they can always lobby to impose similar restrictions on foreign big tech firms operating in the US...

If there were any.

The problem with flipping the table and starting a trade war is everyone loses... And the correct response to someone starting lose-lose games is tit-for-tat. Maybe big tech firms will think twice before throwing their support for an anti-trade candidate. (They absolutely could have used their position in media to stop this insanity, if they wanted to, but now we all have to lie in the bed they've made.)

Ad spots dont need to come from local companies.

And if they are collecting data against EU regulations how do they stop them? They already aren’t complying with the joint venture in this hypothetical. They dont pay the fine. Then you have to ban them.

Thats the dynamic in China. You have a domestic company that owns the operations and is fully regulated bu the host country. And you have to ban anyone that doesn’t cooperate with that model.

Technology transfer agreements are legalized theft.

If you don't like the rules, you're free to not do business in a sovereign's jurisdiction.

Yes. And then this comes back to the original question: how do you prevent EU users from access their services?

How was the US planning to ban Tiktok without a great firewall? I presume they would demand that internet companies don't route their traffic. Stop them locally caching data etc.

Simply make Google and Apple take it down from their app stores, and it would be de facto banned for 95+% of users.

America has a Great Firewall, it's called AppleMobileFileIntegrity.kext[0]. The TikTok ban relied heavily on the fact that a social network practically needs to have a mobile app and thus prohibited them from having it. It was less of a "ban TikTok" bill and more of a "government gets to kick apps off the App Store" bill.

Yes, you could use TikTok on the web; but... have you ever tried using TikTok's web interface? It's an absolute joke. And on the other end, shipping a webapp subjects you to all sorts of consumer-friendly technical interference like ad blockers and de-cluttering that is intended to make the social network serve the user and not itself.

[0] On Android, TikTok did ship an APK to evade being kicked off Google Play; but that's only slightly more effective than telling people to go run AltStore on a Mac or PC to dev-sign a TikTok IPA that will be missing half the features because Apple doesn't allow certain permissions to be provisioned on free dev accounts.

But that would be a great firewall if they applied it as broadly as suggested (to all services that dont transfer majority ownership to EU).

US surely can remove TikTok from the mobile stores and can even force Apple/Google to release an OS update disabling TikTok. That will be sufficient.

If the US removed every non US service that doesn’t transfer majority ownership of US operation to a US firm, like he is suggesting the EU does, then yes. That would constitute a Great Firewall.

Tiktok is the exception that proves the rule .

Maybe something as simple as turnover tax would work

The first sector this happens is defence industry, one of the US of A's biggest exports. EU already decided that weapons will need to be at least 65% manufactured in Europe: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-freeze-us-multi-billion-d...

That's what happens when the USA won't let European countries buy the weapons they want

Specifically, weapons over which we won't have full control after we take delivery. There's another point in that agreement, design authority over those weapons must be in EU — e.g. no licenced components (even 100% manufactured in Europe) that USA needs to provide software updates for.

Yeah. I think regulations of that nature may be coming.

I think in the US, we've put ourselves in a really bad spot. Most will likely blame Trump/Vance, and they definitely deserve their share. But the American tech industry has been contributing its quota towards this break for a long time as well. And we should be honest about that.

Also, I know that no one will want to hear this on HN, but workers at American companies have also not made us any friends in Europe. There is a strong undercurrent of resentment due to some American workers not having the ability to maintain a humble and collaborative demeanor online or IRL.

> I think in the US, we've put ourselves in a really bad spot. Most will likely blame Trump/Vance, and they definitely deserve their share. But the American tech industry has been contributing its quota towards this break for a long time as well. And we should be honest about that.

I think that televised meeting with Zelensky was a wake-up call to many people, including myself

we can't allow ourselves to become any more dependent on the country that elected this regime, and not once (because a mistake can be forgiven), but twice

the current dependency also needs to be reduced to ensure the long survival of our societies and way of life

Chinese do it to steal IP from their joint venture

I would relish the irony of having Google, Microsoft and Facebook complain about IP theft

whilst their AI crawlers plunder any and all copyrighted material ever placed on the internet

But other search engines already crawl Google's websites. If we want to call that IP theft. The alleged IP theft against Google would be new and of a different kind than what Google is committing.

Again, if we want to call web crawling IP theft. Which seems dubious.

This.

These are the kinds of hypocrisies that I'm talking about when I say that American companies from Amazon to Tesla are also responsible for the worsening fracture between the US and EU. Trump and Vance should not escape responsibility for their share of this fiasco. But this transatlantic break is something that was very much a team effort. And as a team we in the US have been, perhaps unwittingly, working towards this hostility for a long time.

As do the Chinese and European AI companies as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com