Unlike Huawei, TikTok doesn't have critical production dependency on the US (specialized semiconductors). Huawei also won't have been too impacted if just their imports were blocked in the US. TikTok will be hurt without US customers, but they are too big in China that they will easily survive. And will easily compete worldwide against any US company.

The reasons I'd seen for considering a US ban on TikTok were all security related (i.e., various claims to the effect of TikTok collecting data on US citizens for usage by the CCP). Those reasons, if valid, would seem to remain valid even in the face of your points here.

Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.

I don't know if they're valid. I think my point is structured in such a way that it doesn't matter in this context: those concerns, if they are or were ever valid, are not rendered invalid by the points that the above commenter was making. I don't believe I have the background to comment meaningfully on whether TikTok is an actual security threat to US citizens or whether the US government would be hypocritical in banning TikTok for such a reason. The question of hypocrisy also seems like a separate one to me (i.e., should one not do the correct thing because it would be seen as hypocritical by some?).

Would a thief not take precautions to avoid having his own home robbed just because he is a thief himself?

There are many things countries and people do which they will not accept having done to them in turn.

True, but if an objective party was reporting on this, I think they would mention that it was in fact a thief taking such precautions, rather than a non-descript local resident.

Of course they're valid criticisms. The US can behave hypocritically and still be correct.

These are valid.

It doesn't matter what the US did in Europe here does it?

Allowing China to spy should be stopped regardless.

Would you rather a country that many people around the world wants to migrate to in order to pursue their dreams spying on you (USA), or a country where people are put in concentration camps (China and the Uyghurs) spying on you?

I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils.

I see your argument a lot and its quite stupid.

As someone who has family in Syria that was bombed by US and their allies but had never been bombed by China, I'd rather China be spying on me. As far as I know, CCP has never attacked any country out of its borders.

If you are in America from Syria and have a dislike for America because of past bombings I would be more concerned with them over China.

As far as never attacked anyone. Of course they have. China is part of that US allies group fighting terrorism in your families homeland. Here is a list for you of all of the conflicts:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_P...

Those are almost all internal conflicts within China. The only major foreign wars China has been involved in since the founding of the PRC are the Korean War, the Sino-Indian border conflict, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. It's been more than 40 years since China was involved in a major foreign conflict.

I thought China had a lot of border conflicts.

https://www.indiatvnews.com/fyi/india-china-border-dispute-w...

Looking some of them up seperatly, the article seems correct.

Stating border conflicts with 18 countries

It has border disputes, but it hasn't been involved in any major military conflict since 1979.

Most (probably all) countries in South and East Asia have multiple border disputes. Japan has disputes with China, Russia and South Korea. India has disputes with Pakistan, China and Nepal, and used to have disputes with Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. See a trend? Every major country in the region has or has had disputes with every neighboring country.

They are part of the war on terror. However you classify that it has been the major conflict over the last 20 years.

Which Chinese military operations are you referring to?

I am not in America so your argument is not valid.

As for your link, most of it is about peace keeping missions. The others involve countries that share a border with China. As I said, China has for the most part never attacked countries it didn't share borders with and I don't live in any of these. Even then, they haven't done carpet bombing, used chemical or nuclear weapons against these countries unlike the US.

I think the use of government surveillance is less likely to be used to conduct drone strikes and far more likely to prompt a Tiananmen square esque response to dissent. Thus I would firmly disagree with this sentiment.

I'd very much prefer Chinese spying me over USA, as they have significantly less effect on my life.

For example, if USA found out something about me that they don't like, they might prevent me from visiting USA in the future (which is something I might want to do), or they might force U.S. companies (e.g. PayPal, Google) to close my online accounts. And they might do those things unilaterally as I'm not a U.S. citizen.

On the other hand, I wouldn't care much if China banned me from visiting or from business with their companies.

US has their own camp too, not as bad as Uighur camps perhaps, but on a big scale: the Gaza Strip. It's status has been maintained through US's UN security council veto power for decades.

On a much smaller scale, we're still running Guantanamo.

If you're going to bring up Israel and the area around it, I was just looking at Wikipedia's page on wars involving the PRC, which reminded me (if I ever knew) that Tibet has been annexed to the PRC for just about the same time that modern Israel has been around.

I think it's worth mentioning that the US has not always been the preeminent ally of Israel since its founding. A lot of people seem to just have this vague sense that it's always been the situation. It's something that happened relatively recently.

They don't need anything more than a single Chinese national who they can blackmail to be able to get what they want. A quick meeting to the persons family to make sure they get the message its all it needs.

The CCP has leverage on any Chinese national who still has family in China.

And controlling the content narrative. E.g. pro-china content could be promoted directly to young Americans.

Even Huawei functionally has an advanced enough node at SMIC (14nm-ish) to fulfill their core industry.

For their handset SoCs, sure. But the real prize appears to be the base station market. As I understand it, Huawei's base stations are critically dependent upon Xilinx FPGAs. With those no longer available to them, Huawei is in a difficult position.

They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.).

I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.

I wouldn't be so sure. 14nm is already competitive with Xilinx FPGAs in terms of efficiency. All Huawei has to do is build ASICs instead, and they should keep or improve their performance. Xilinx is on a mix of 20nm and 16nm, by the way.

The billions of dollars that the Chinese Government will invest in order to compensate for the sanctions might have the unintended side effects of actually making performance of Huawei gear more efficient. The jump from FPGA to ASIC is pretty big as far as efficiency, and being able to have it financed for free to defend against US sanctions is pretty sweet.

They also happen to have stockpiled enough FPGAs to buy time for the transition.

They are not currently using ASICs, so ASICs are presumably not a good fit for the application. Maybe the NRE costs are too excessive given the very small volume, flexibility/updateability is essential, TTM is too long, something else, or some combination of the above. Any way you slice it, being cut off from Xilinx is going to cost Huawei.

Building a competitive ASIC will also be significantly more challenging now that Huawei has been cut off from all the major EDA companies.

Finally, I assume that Xilinx is well into development on future product lines based on newer processes. It would be extremely difficult for Huawei to bootstrap their way to commercially competitive FPGAs.

Part of this commitment may be to incent Google to lobby on behalf of TikTok against a ban.

That seems unlikely, given the readable part of the article says that this happened in "May 2019".

You're right, they've been at it for a year already. Probably why the app isn't banned yet

At some point people in the administration talked about potentially doing something to that effect.

I highly doubt it will ever materialize.

If the US banned American companies from selling to ByteDance/TikTok, then yes, ByteDance would have to move to a non-US cloud like Alibaba.

>>If US banned TikTok

Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it

At most they could bar employees of the federal government (and its contractors) from using it, which given the federal government is one of the largest would have a large impact. Even that limited action however would be met with a large legal challenge and would have a good chance of failure for anything that is not a Government Computer / Phone / Network

> our constitution would forbid it

[Citation needed]

On the contrary, the US constitution specifically permits regulation of international trade as an enumerated power. All the US government needs to do is put ByteDance on the same entity list they put ZTE and Huawei on and Apple and Google would have no choice but to pull TikTok from their app stores.

> Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it

"National Security"

All they need to do is poke the Play Store / App Store the right way and, poof, it's gone. They don't need to legally ban it, just send a strongly worded letter.

Well given that Google is anti-trump I am sure they would not simply do what Trump says.

Now if Biden was elected I am sure it would be different

The US bans french cheeses and Kinder eggs, I am pretty sure they can ban a chinese spyware.

It’s called an “Executive Order”.

This will bypass the constitution every time. It’s how the president takes a dump on the constitution.