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by dmvinson
2439 days ago
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Ben Thompson continues to amaze. Pointing out the pointlessness of controlling the impact of tech by limiting Facebook's influence is important. Authoritarian China's biggest advantage is its ability to pick winners and multiply their impact by leveraging how decisive their decision making can be. Where this fails is at finding local maximums. The winners China picks will be the best of what's available right now, which for a while has often been a Chinese clone of what's working in America, adapted to local preferences. America's startup culture and competitiveness is our biggest advantage, and so I wish the US and EU would do more to force tech. companies to fight it out instead of picking winners by regulating the industry and controlling what Facebook and Google can do. Instead of just putting cumbersome regulations like the GDPR around user data, also dictate companies above a certain size have to have open APIs and easily exportable/programmatically accessible user data. Obviously this must be balanced by granular controls, but how can upstarts be incumbents when the data moats are so large. The APIs of Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are pretty abysmal and continue to become worse with no punishment. Yet, that programmatic access to data is probably the only way an upstart could compete outside of a complete paradigm shift. |
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It's not an advantage against China though when they can do both of:
- Block US apps from the Chinese market - Encourage wholesale copying of the best features from US companies
If I were to start a FB clone of <insert any social app> in the US, it would fail miserably. China can ban the US version and simultaneously fund a clone for the Chinese market. Combined with the fact that Chinese networks (e.g. TikTok) have full access to the US market, this makes competition very asymmetric.