Much like Google was eating the lunch of everything in China and the CCP, in response, made it essentially impossible for them to operate.

This is not new behavior between the two countries, the only thing new is the direction. US is finally waking up to the foreign soft power being exercised inside our own country, and it isn't benefiting us.

> Google was eating the lunch of everything in China and the CCP, in response, made it essentially impossible for them to operate.

Google was operating in China until 2010 when they got banned because they stopped censoring search results. Other Western search engines like Bing continue operate in China.

They also got their source code stolen by Chinese state hackers. The word "hostile" doesn't begin to describe their experience operating on the mainland.

Completely tangential, but from personal experience, the performance of Google Search had been degraded for at least 2 years prior, so when it was banned it was already mostly useless anyway.

GMail continued for a few years after that - I'm not even sure if it was ever actually banned, or just suffered the same fate (death by a thousands timeouts).

That certainly plays some role in why domestic social media companies haven't stirred up resistance to the ban, but is more like #50 in terms of geopolitical strategy.

The domestic companies lost some attention share to TikTok sure, and a ban or domestic sale would generally be in their interests, but it's not like they were about to be Myspaced. They've remained among the most valued companies -- presently and in forecasts -- even while it was "eating their lunch"

> it's not like they were about to be Myspaced. They've remained among the most valued companies

It hasn't been an overnight switch, but the trajectory did not look good for US companies. TikTok was even eating into TV viewing time. There's a fixed amount of attention and TikTok was vacuuming it up from everywhere.

I won’t say that isn’t relevant; when you’re building a coalition you don’t say no to allies. But it was a cherry on top of a well-baked pie. Not a foundational motivation.

True, but I'd say that in this area (vs. manufacturing where tariffs can be applied), it's more taboo/embarrassing to admit how dominated Instagram was. Reels is the cheap knockoff of the genuine article.

> it's more taboo/embarrassing to admit how dominated Instagram was

Where? Stockholders have been vocally livid about it.

This is just a different bias on point 3, reciprocity. BYD benefits from state subsidies and state sponsored intellectual property theft on an industrial scale. See again, point 3.

>Meta can't make a psyop as dangerous

We should treat social media as the addictive, mind altering drug it is, and stop acting like a free market saturation of them is a good thing.

China having their more potent mind control app pointed at the brains of hundreds of millions of people is not something to celebrate.