[dleeftink]

I think here, the question of reciprocal digital communication and the (free) flow of information is markedly different from the reciprocity of physical goods, as the latter has historically had far stricter entry requirements, regulatory, monetary, or otherwise.

Regarding the former, none of the global players are perfect when it comes to unencumbered access to their respective digital markets, but as Tiktok (and recently Temu) demonstrate, getting a foothold in one may be easier than another.

[maxglute]

PRC regulatory requirements for communication is expensive for domestic players, why should western entrants be spared? That's like allowing PRC auto in US on less stringent safety requirements. The reason FB and twitter pulled out in 09 after minority/terrorist attacks was because they didn't have the moderation system in place, while PRC platforms had 10000s of expensive, physical bodies doing the grunt work at the time. Which was prescient, and it wasn't until western platforms started implementing mass moderation post NZ shooting that they started initatives to retner PRC market (FB & Google at least), because they finally spent the money and can now scale it in PRC. It was only internal drama at FB and Google that killed the project. If anything TikTok has to bend backwards harder than US platforms to appease US gov because they don't know what "speech" triggers US politicians, whereas in PRC, western companies just had to say yes to censorship and access requests.

[makeitdouble]

> unencumbered access to their respective digital markets

I wonder about this. Up until recently dominant networks were US native or backed by US companies (e.g. even Spotify for instance has a US office, is traded on the NY exchange and is backed by US cloud services) so we haven't seen what happens when a sheer foreign company gets a foothold in the market. Until Tiktok.

And as Tiktok is getting banned, I get the feeling any other foreign company reaching a dominant position with no US transparency would get the same treatment under national security or any other pretense, with US politicians opining that citizen data getting sucked away isn't acceptable. Especially as the foreign compnay's money doesn't land in their party's pockets the same Meta's or Alphabet's money does.