[wongarsu]

In a slight oversimplification of geopolitics, any company can be pressured by either Russia, China or the US. From the last two decades we have plenty of reports of all three of them happily abusing this power.

The best you can do to stay up to date on what's happening is listening to all three sides. Kaspersky can't speak out against Russia, but at the same time they are free (and probably encouraged) to expose cybersecurity threats coming from Western governments; which most Western cybersecurity companies seem to be unable or unwilling to talk about.

[AbrahamParangi]

This is a false equivalence. The situations are not the same or frankly even close to it.

[avgcorrection]

Very true. America is much more powerful than the other two.

[bayesian_horse]

On the contrary. The US government has a lot less power to control private companies. They do try and even succeed sometimes, but it's nothing even close to the total command and control Russia and China regularly exert.

[avgcorrection]

Right.

In capitalist America, corporation controls government.

[throw10920]

Yup. As a trivial example, the US neither has a "misinformation control agency" like Roskomnadzor, nor requires companies to implement real-time monitoring+censorship of restricted language into their communication products (a la China [1]).

Comparisons between these tyrannical governments and the US fall somewhere between "ignorant" and "willfully deceitful".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China

[pessimizer]

We tried to open one mere months ago.

But aside from that, the US government happily pressures companies with unrelated retribution for not following orders. Instead of an agency that has staff, process, records, etc. you get threats directed at particular people e.g. this regulatory judgment at company X that you own will go against you if you don't do this thing that we've press released that we're asking company Y that you own to do. Or your contracts get dropped.

It's like the US justice system in general, where they'll do things like making you plead guilty to something in order to keep your sister's children from being taken away.

Is that preferable? Are you seriously saying that you still want this stuff to be done, but you hate that it's done above board, in public?

Misinformation warriors criticize this stuff in other countries while simultaneously supporting it here. They've also started saying "false equivalence" together over the past year (maybe an influential book or blog?) which for them means that censorship is good in the US because we only censor bad things, but censorship is bad when our enemies do it because they censor good things. You can pair it with "whataboutism" which has also changed in meaning - it used to mean that someone answered your criticism of something (Soviet business freedoms) with a completely unrelated charge against you (that you are an apartheid state.) Now it means that when you criticize Russia for invading another country, when they criticize you for invading another country that's "whataboutism" because they're the bad guys and we're the good guys.

These arguments wouldn't convince children if laid bare rather than being paired with accusations that you're probably a Russian or Chinese spy if you disagree with them, and that eventually they'll come for you and give you what you deserve.

> fall somewhere between "ignorant" and "willfully deceitful".

I mean, this is a threat, right?

[throw10920]

This comment is a thicket of misdirection and false equivalences.

> We tried to open one mere months ago.

There is no "we" - that was the current administration in a widely criticized and highly unconstitutional move that was eventually reversed (but will doubtless be tried again).

> But aside from that, the US government happily pressures companies with unrelated retribution for not following orders.

Again, completely incomparable. Visible "pressure", using loopholes in laws written for other purposes, as opposed to the very legal structure itself being designed explicitly allow the government to punish companies and citizens for things like "disturbing national unity" to quote the Chinese government.

Things like that can happen in any country, due to corruption - it's categorically different when the government can force companies to decrypt user content because it's written into the laws and working as intended.

The majority of Americans think that what the NSA is doing is unconstitutional, and at least some of them have been asking their representatives to reverse it. In China, they don't have anything equivalent to the Constitution - the government can do whatever they want, and not only have the citizens been conditioned to not complain, but they can't complain because of the pervasive surveillance, no right to free speech, and dystopian "social credit" system that actively punishes individuals for speaking out.

It's pretty blindingly clear that the situations in China and the US are incomparable.

> this regulatory judgment at company X that you own will go against you if you don't do this thing that we've press released that we're asking company Y that you own to do. Or your contracts get dropped.

Again, the situations of a company being threatened with regulatory action and an individual being threatened with disappearance, torture, and death are completely incomparable. The fact that this is the worst you can come up with is a pretty strong indicator that you have no ground for an argument.

> It's like the US justice system in general

What is this absurd, off-topic, unfalsifiable comparison out of nowhere? Citizens in the US have the right to a fair & public trial, and the right to see their accusers and the evidence against them - in China and Russia, those rights do not exist, and the state can just disappear you whenever they want.

> Is that preferable? Are you seriously saying that you still want this stuff to be done, but you hate that it's done above board, in public?

Nowhere in my comment did I say anything remotely resembling that. This is called "fabrication".

> Misinformation warriors criticize this stuff in other countries while simultaneously supporting it here.

"Misinformation" is a dogwhistle for authoritarians. And I can't help but note that you're using another unfalsifiable claim, as well - that some unknown group is pushing some poorly-defined propaganda both in the US and another outside the US.

> They've also started saying "false equivalence" together over the past year

Google Trends proves you wrong[1].

And, finally, you're inventing a complex of vague, poorly-defined, impossible-to-quantify accusations against some unnamed groups ("misinformation warriors") that are completely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Your tried to misdirect the conversation about the relative power of US vs Chinese governments to a strawman of what some mystical boogieman is doing, because you couldn't actually come up with any instances of the US government exerting levels of control comparable to what the US or Russia does.

> I mean, this is a threat, right?

My statement doesn't remotely resemble a threat. You're trying to play the victim to a fabricated threat. Extremely dishonest.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...