Oh no! Anyway…
It’s going to be to their advantage to claim that they’re shutting down, even if they actually want that $50B buyout. If they say they’re going to sell, they’re going to lose what little leverage they have left. The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
I read it as a bluff too.
They’re between a rock and a hard place, their best position is to play hardball and rile up their users.
Yeah, it means nothing to us to leave. We’re losing money!
If that were really the case why are they in the US at all? Because they know they can make money and their market position is strong.
Because China is trying to influence the US and they need to be in the US market for that
This is why the whole situation exists, IMO if there was a reason to believe China is trying to influence united states citizens, then this wouldn’t even be a discussion. There are probably hundreds of Chinese companies that operate in the US, why is tik tok signaled out? Because there’s probably a reason they’re being singled out. It might be nothing, but I’m inclined to think that the people who signed the bill know more than what they’re letting on for national security reasons.
Look at any security analysis done on it and you’ll see the insane amount of information it collects from every single user is absolutely stunning. They definitely use their influence and knowledge of individuals to drive opinion of those who use their platform.
There are probably hundreds of Chinese companies that operate in the US, why is tik tok signaled out?
Because it’s an enormous company with a lot of influence on people. If they actually influence people in that way, I don’t know but they could quite easily.
Personally I don’t care about TikTok.
Yeah I watched this dude show me a video of a device that opens jars and now I am thinking about becoming a spy for the Chinese government.
But they can’t continue to make money this way. It will be seen as control. So they’re stuck creating a competitor or just writing off the US market.
Yeah I think they’re angling for a reversal, if not they’ll sell and probably take some massive non voting share of the venture along with a bunch of billionaires.
They won’t sell lol, like why would they? If they truly are owned by the Chinese government why would they sell it to an American company?
The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
Has their user base mobilized at all? Maybe it’s just because I don’t use TikTok but I haven’t really heard much from their users about the ban. Which has been kind of unexpected.
Apparently TikTok sent out push notifications telling users to call their representatives. Minors were being provided instructions with their representatives’ phone numbers and contact info, but didn’t even know who they were calling and were asking basic questions like “What is Congress?”
Kind of shows the amount of power TikTok has over American youth.
I love how they demonstrated they aren’t influencing people by sending out a mass message telling people what to do. It doesn’t get any more comical than that.
Malign influence. Telling people to participate in democracy isn’t a bad thing.
Yes but telling an army of thirteen year olds doing dance videos to call representatives is worthless, if anything it hurts TikToks argument since it proves they’re doing the influencing of Americans that the government wants them not doing
So you’ve never used TikTok. Good to know.
You missed the entire point. They declared 1) We are not doing anything of that sort, then: 2) they did exactly things of that sort. It’s like a slap stick comedy show.
And facebook tells its users to vote. Encouraging people to make their voices heard and engage in the democratic process is a good thing.
I’d say absolutely, if Cambridge Analytica wasn’t a thing. I’d honestly rather have people not vote than be motivated to go vote because they think the liberal communists are putting fluoride in water to make frogs gay.
It’s somehow always the organizations and individuals who are trying to manipulate people that seem to care the most about people’s voices being heard in politics. Churches, social media, daytime TV, that crazy uncle you don’t like to talk to at family gatherings…
Hey some of us are the crazy cousin saying you should vote while also advocating pissing on the floor when your job tries to deny bathroom rights.
I’d prefer to have you as my cousin instead of the one I have who hates brown people and believes Trump won the 2020 election.
Only if ya can deal with ranting about how modern cars suck due to overuse of electronics and half crazed rants about guns and how we should bring back neighborhood militias.
“Vote to participate in democracy! Here’s some local voting resources”
vs
“Vote to protect our interests! Tell your representative that they are killing free speech if they don’t listen to me”
An enemy state giving kids a script of nonsense to harass politicians with is absolutely not a good thing.
Rival is better than enemy, but yes. We’re as friendly with China as we are enemies. It’s complicated, but I don’t want the simple version to be the narrative.
They’re not a rival. They’re a hostile power.
We are both dependent on each other because that’s how the global economy works, but we are not friends and there is no possible path to friendship unless one of our countries has an extremely bloody revolution and completely changes our mechanism of government.
Our core ideologies are not compatible.
You just haven’t been paying attention.
When you’re forced to participate in capitalism, your only option is to play the game. I agree, this is mostly just a bluff.
Why though? Why would they give up their trade secrets? They have a global market.
They could sell the user accounts and content and let another company clip that into their own recommendation algo.
I’ve been a part of a few tech acquisitions that have worked this way. They keep their secret sauce but hand over the community.
Yeah that’s certainly possible. I just don’t think it will go the way people are thinking.
The question is if anyone would buy it without the algorithm and the other stuff worth money. Users by themselves aren’t very useful if everyone leaves after a day.
It would come down to price. I’m sure someone would pay for the content, accounts, and brand. But what dollar amount are we talking about when the algo isn’t on the table.
The algorithm either isn’t as valuable as they believe or the government’s concern is legitimate and we have a real problem.
Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?
Better to force US competition to start from scratch.
I mean the sale agreement could require the buyer to never expand outside the US.
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For money. Whoever buys it has to pay you for it. Shutting down just means leaving a gaping hole in American social media that some other company will fill and you’ll be in the same position but with less money.
YouTube/IG are hardly starting from scratch.
But they don’t have the international reach of TikTok.
Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?
TikTok would remain exactly the same, with the exact same algorithms, but it would then be the free speech of a US Citizen so everyone would be happy. Maybe TikTok couldn’t send the data directly to China anymore, but they could certainly sell personal data on the shadowy data markets, just like every other US owned tech company does, and if that data happens to find its way to China then 🤷 .
Shell companies hide the true owner of companies all the time. Why can’t TikTok do the same?
The problem is they targeted TikTok specifically in the law and it will be easy to circumvent. “TikTok is banned, but check out this totally new website called TokTik with the exact same content but owned by a US Citizen”.
This is why they should have created regulations that apply to all companies. Because making regulations that depend on who owns the company will only cause TikTok to change the technicality of who owns the company. They can do so through all kinds of legal tricks without ever actually giving up control.
Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?
They already did that. TikTok is incorporated in the Cayman Islands with headquarters in Los Angeles. The bill of attainder is post-that
Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?
Who? What USA citizen is prepared to buy something for the privilege of fighting the USA government with would obviously get mad and probably block the sale if byte Dance TikTok is still involved.
I don’t really follow USA politics but didn’t this law pass by quite large margins? They could obviously ban toktik.
They can’t actually ban TikTok by name, it’s unconstitutional to make laws targeted at individuals.
The current law actually says “no company can operate in the US with over 20% owned by China, Iran, N. Korea, or Russia”, or something like that.
There’s a lot of people in the US and at least of few of them would be willing to run TikTok the same way, same algorithms, same content, and sell the users data on shadowy data markets (which China can surely get their hands on), etc. I’m repeating myself now.
Again, my point is there are a lot of people in the US and surely some of them can form a company willing to do what China wants, and isn’t that their right by our laws and morals of free speech? I know if things get heated enough laws and morals will be ignored (see Japanese internment camps).
And my even broader point is that this move against TikTok has ulterior motives. We should have created regulations that apply to all companies instead of targeting TikTok specifically. Even though we didn’t technically target TikTok specifically, we effectively did.
Our House of Representatives and Senate are more than 20% owned by Russia.
They could even own a President. Unheard of! /s
If you help TikTok in that way you would absolutely get on the government’s hit list (literal or not).
It would probably be quite easy to just make a new law or revision that stops the theoretical loophole.
Do it.
TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance’s DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.
So much drama in the US over this but it’s apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.
It’s almost like making money is not the primary purpose of this website 🤔
Or … maybe the US isn’t the only country in the world?
Lmao yeah OK 👍. Name any other country.
I have a Geography degree lmao, but also, you’re an asshole. I don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish with this comment.
he’s being sarcastic (im pretty sure)
Your sensing of humour is failing.
Didn’t seem like a joke to me, just seemed dismissive and rude. 🤷🏻♂️ People on this site frequently pull this 🤓oh yeah name a whatever🤓 shit unironically, so unless Lemmy gets a culture makeover I’m going to assume people are being assholes.
All that talking and you still ain’t even named one other country besides united states. The whole world is united States.
Fwiw I’m not American.
It’s not worth anything, your argument was that the US being such a small percentage of tiktoks userbase meant that the American market is only worthwhile to TikTok as a spying tool. Which does not make any sense.
I’m saying that tiktok has other markets in other countries, and the US only represents a small part of their global reach, so of course tiktok would only be a small percentage of their userbase.
Yeah same with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, fox news, CNN, News max, Msnbc and every single other media outlet by that logic. Apparently any company not owned Merica is propaganda too.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if ByteDance sells TikTok for $5 to a US Citizen who frequently visits China for lavish vacations, and that US Citizen decide to keep all the algorithms the same.
If China has an ulterior motive with TIkTok, can’t they just find a US Citizen to carry out their ulterior motive?
No. The bill is quite specific about that.
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This means absolutely nothing.
How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US. They have shopping, I’ll bet the US buys the most.
China already has livestream shopping, it’s still relatively novel in the US. Bytedance has to compete with other local competitors in China, hating a nice external source of revenue in the US fuelling these Chinese battle is a huge boon.
I know the article says loss making app, but I bet a lot of money goes back to R&D creating the loss. They pay massive sums to get merchants to sell on their app for example.
This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.
To quote the article again, “The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge.” Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn’t in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It’s likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven’t been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn’t bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it’s still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it’s just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
You’re assuming its a profit-focused endeavor rather than a propaganda arm of the Chinese government.
I think it’s a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I’m certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that’s just a necessary business expense.
Bro, Facebook facilitated a genocide, and this is who we want to buy TikTok? What action was taken against fb?
“US coRpOrAtiOn goOd!”
Not US corporation good, just US corporation = US controlled. This isn’t a morality play, it’s a national security play.
If TikTok’s purpose is to spread Chinese propaganda, can’t they just find a US Citizen that can run the website for them?
“Yeah, it’s my personal website where I exercise my 1st Amendment rights, also it has 100 million daily users and I happen to agree with China on a lot of things.” If a US Citizen were to say this, there would be nothing illegal about it I think?
Well China is refusing to divest, i.e. sell it to a US owner so clearly that’s not an option for them. If it was about the money they would have.
We are talking about the same country right? The US committed the fucking Tuskegee experiments, MK ultra, and more recently Gitmo as a whole. If some dumbfuck wants to be a Chinese puppet I wouldnt put it past the feds to off em, shame they commited suicide by shooting themself in the back of the head twelve times with a shotgun.
Okay, but I’m more interested in intra-legal reasons this couldn’t be done.
I’m sure they could find 2, 3, or 3000 US Citizens who are willing to sell out to China, and then TikTok would be owned by US Citizens, but would still be doing what China wants.
I was moreso pointing out the obvious and quick solution. On a more legal situation, I suspect that said individual could be taken down as a foreign agent, most of the laws around that shit from the cold war are still on the books. The fact of the matter is youre are coming at this from the perspective that we dont have laws around what foreign agents are allowed to do, Americans can certainly be foreign agents just ask my 2x great grandfather who was snitching on the Bund who were almost all American born.
5% of customers driving 25% of revenue is a market you want to invest in.
Amazon wasn’t profitable for how many years? It’s the exact same play. Take a loss to create something artificially desirable, strangle the competition and lock up your walled garden, then crank the prices.
I’ve talked with merchants TikTok Shop recruited, TikTok was paying them a ton to sell there, eating their processing fees, their shipping costs, and paying for massive discounts to customers so they could juice their metrics.
They’re starting to crank up their fees this spring and summer.
Same with advertising, advertisers want to go to TikTok, but I’m sure most of the actual spend is happening outside the app on influencers. TikTok wants that pie too.
Taking a loss means nothing in this context
Also, hard to quantify how much of the popularity of tiktok is driven by US content globally, versus locally. You lose all that UGC is you cut out US
“Livestream shopping” is that like QVC or something?
Yeah, kinda
You watch TikTok, someone shills a product, you buu it with a button that pops up, or you click into their store to buy their cosmetics line.
Looks like they’re saying it’s running at a loss and is valued at $50b, so that Musk would end up buying it off their hands.
If they want Musks attention they should have valued it at $69b
EU next please
Don’t use it if you don’t like it, but don’t give this bullshit Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda control of something just because you don’t like it.
It’s just as bad or good as any other algorithm based content app like Facebook or Instagram. If we have a problem with privacy for example then go after that like with gdpr.
I think you have it backwards, in that it’s the US that’s trying to stop all the Chinese propaganda coming from that app.
And if TT pull out of the US, it’s pretty telling that their core drive for that thing wasn’t money.
Why would a tech company sell their product to another competitor in such a big landscape like US? It’s quite very much because of money.
Well for one, because if they don’t then they will get precisely 0 money. If it is indeed about the money then we would absolutely expect them to sell no? Otherwise… There’s no money
0 money from us market. They still have a big market outside US. Why would they sabotage it by giving an advantage to a competitor. No money is better than negative money.
While they would no longer be competing in the US market, any ‘competitor’ would have to do the work of gaining billions of customers in other countries, that are already entrenched into Tik Tok user space. I think that worry is kinda moot if you’re TT leadership.
If France passes a law requiring Google to sell Google France to a French company, would Google pulling out instead of selling mean their core drive in France wasn’t money?
Google is an American company. Apples and Oranges.
I don’t think it’s primarily about the algorithm or “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” but instead about data and company ownership. Currently the US and EU are far closer allies with each other than with china. Services that are owned/controlled by their countries are therefore prioritized, and competing services from non-ally countries are way more scrutinized.
We already sanction TV stations because of their propaganda content e.g. Russia Today. I see this as no different.
Then the EU would need some evidence of propaganda.
I dislike TikTok but should you really be banning platforms you don’t like?
Sanction them if they misbehave, yes. Prevent most of the population from communicating using it? Absolutely not.
Americans have weird priorities when it comes to freedom. The mental gymnastics I’ve been seeing trying to justify a ban of a platform to a massive population of people is nuts.
No, it isn’t “actually upholding” freedom of speech to ban TikTok.
Congress believes it’s a national security threat which is probably true but they haven’t bothered explaining this to their constituents at all. Ideally they’d pass comprehensive privacy protection laws to setup standards that both domestic and foreign companies would be subject to. Then companies either adjust their behaviors and meet a certain level of transparency or they would be prosecuted under the law.
But no… We get this instead: a confusing and obviously targeted ultimatum with Congress telling everyone ‘trust me bro this is the only way’.
deally they’d pass comprehensive privacy protection laws to setup standards that both domestic and foreign companies would be subject to.
No, no, no. That would mean dismantling PRISM and the FISA. Gathering data on citizens is only bad when China does it.
I mean, to be fair, both are extremely bad and should be stopped, but a hostile foreign country gathering data and pushing propaganda on your citizens IS worse than you or non-hostile foreign countries doing it.
I would argue that gathering data about your own citizens is actively worse than china doing it; an average US citizen has a lot more to lose if the 3-letter-agencies or the police use it against them, because those are who you would have to deal with in person.
Valid point. I think the issue is that we know there is no good reason for China to have that data, and we know that they are hostile, so it’s an easy decision.
but chyna bad duh
I don’t think most Americans want tiktok banned . Unfortunately the US government just does what ever they want and right now there is too much pro Palestine information on tiktok .
should you really be banning platforms you don’t like?
Yes, but only if that platform is Twitter
lol you think “freedom of speech” includes foreign adversary right to harvest American citizen data?
Exactly. I only want my data to be harvested by the NSA. It feels more patriotic.
If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.
But if TikTok is a Chinese psyop, they’ll just use any of the many legal tricks we allow to change the “owner” while China still retains control. Companies do this all the time, look at shell companies and such. It’s super easy for China to mask the true owner if they decide to.
This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.
If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.
If the sale is forced, the value of the property will be depressed. Why would they take pennies on the dollar to liquidate IP rather than fight it out in court and try to get the provision overturned?
This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.
The law is not specific to TikTok. It is any company owned by a subsidiary of an “enemy” state, of which China is listed as such.
And selling the company to a non-Chinese holding company wouldn’t work, because the dispute is over Chinese IP law affecting how ByteDance does business. Move the company overseas and it would no longer be covered by the IP provisions (something the Chinese investors don’t want, because they benefit from the IP provisions).
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Why would the forced sale of a product have an impact on the value?
I have a shelf full of cupcakes. They each cost me $1 to make. I would like to generate a 20% profit, so I sell them for $1.20/ea.
Then the government passes the “UnderpantsWeevil Can’t Sell Cupcakes In the US Act of 2024”, effective in one minute. A financial tycoon from American Cupcake Corp comes by my shop and says “I’ll pay you $.10 for those cupcakes, which will be worthless to you in the next 59 seconds.” He intended to buy them from me and sell them at his store, across the street, for $1.30/ea.
He’s not under any time constraint, but I am. So if I can’t move the balance of my cupcakes in a minute, they become worthless to me.
Logically, I should sell any cupcakes I can’t move off the shelf in a minute to American Cupcake Corp, even at this depressed asking price.
If anything, the fact that it’s being forced to “sell” should make the existing social media companies froth at the mouth.
Why would any social media company bid the real value of the property when the real value falls to zero in nine months?
And - let us assume, hypothetically, that these American tech companies have a history of operating as a cartel - why would they not coordinate their bids to guarantee the smallest possible auction price?
Why would any social media company bid the real value of the property when the real value falls to zero in nine months?
I could see Google buying the brand even without the secret algorithm, and now the next app update will start showing YouTube Shorts. Or maybe they would just start showing “tiktoks” in the YouTube app, with no mention of yt shorts.
Meta seems like a possible choice too. Hell, maybe Elon Musk will waste billions of dollars ruining it and throwing away an extremely popular brand.
I could see Google buying the brand even without the secret algorithm
Not at the company’s pre-law market cap
I’m not an economist but that makes sense to me.
What about a modified scenario:
A small island has three cupcake makers operating out of their homes: Meta, Alphabet, and Bytedance. Each has captured a section of the island’s market with cupcakes and at this point, there’s no real opportunity for growth. Meta can’t convince Bytedance’s customers to switch because they prefer other flavors. Meta would need to purchase one of the other cupcake companies in order to expand.
None of the cupcake makers are interested in selling their companies. They consider themselves elite and their successes feed into the CEO and shareholder perceptions of value and success.
Now, we consider that one of the cupcake companies is funded by a rich uncle from a different country. The island’s elders decide that the uncle’s influence is too great and orders Bytedance to sell its cupcake company or leave the island.
We’ve established earlier that people who like Bytedance cupcakes don’t necessarily want to eat Meta or Alphabet cupcakes, so if they leave the market, those customers may be gone for good. They may have a change of heart and decide that cupcakes of any flavor are fine, but they may also be angry that the government forced their favorite place out of business. In any case, Meta and Alphabet cannot rely capturing this segment of the market to grow.
Faced with the dilemma of possibly gaining customers organically or definitely gaining customers by purchasing their preferred product brand, I’d argue that the remaining companies may jump on the opportunity to purchase Bytedance before they are forced out. None of the cupcake companies were up for sale in a traditional sense before, so this was never a realistic path to achieve growth.
He’s not under any time constraint
Remind me not to eat at your house.
Does selling from one hand to the other actually matter when it comes to value? If I own a company and sell it to myself via a shell corporation have I actually lost anything, except a tax write off?
I take no stance on the psyop thing but is always selling the best way to seek profits. I say no. Unless they can sell and somehow force the buyer to operate exclusively in the USA. If not then there is still the rest of the world to profit from and selling their entire USA branch would suddenly create a new huge competitor.
Tiktok is used globally. Only American politicians seem concerned about the platform why would bytedance sell it when they can just continue operating in 180 other countries around the world?
It’s not available in China though interestingly
True story, Tiktok has never been available in mainland China.
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-ban-china-india-376f32d78861e14e65ec4bc78e808a0d
In mainland China it’s called Douyin, exactly the same app, same company, not the same content of course. It’s separate because Beijing wants a tighter control on social media in mainland China.
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Actually many governments are concerned about it. But only the US (so far) had pulled the nuclear option.
I feel like they’re threatening a shutdown in the hopes of getting them to reverse their decision because if they just quietly go along with it, other countries will likely quickly follow suit in short order.
The reality is that the lifespan of “most popular social media app” is incredibly short. In the space of a few short years, we’ve gone from MySpace to Facebook to twitter to vine to Snapchat and now to tiktok.
TikTok will soon enough be replaced by “the next cool thing” and BD knows that if they sell in the US, that new entity will quickly replace them globally because the US effectively IS the influencer market.
Viewers go where the content is, and that’s still overwhelmingly American (for better or worse). There is no successful social media app without including the US and BD knows it.
So was google an American psyop for pulling out of China instead of submitting to censorship?
Then Weibo and WeChat will geoblock US in response to TikTok ban.
The amount of people happy about their government deciding to ban websites and apps is terrifying. They dont give a fuck about your privacy they’re just mad they dont control the algorithm. Now they can have people move to instagram reels where its easier to serve the propaganda the oligarchs prefer
The u.s. still wouldn’t control the algorithm even if bytedance sold because they are not required to sell to a u.s. company. As long as the new company isn’t controlled by the ccp(or probably also russ, n Korea, iran) the u.s. doesn’t care who owns it.
So be it. The vaccuum it will leave will get filled by another platform.
The whole point of this bill is for mark zuckerberg’s lobbying money to finally get people to use Reels
Reels and YouTube shorts both suck, the algorithms push the most asinine content, or stuff I saw on tiktok MONTHS ago.
They didn’t lobby this bill. Google, oracle, did
This the goal of this bill.
Good. Please proceed as quickly as possible.
They’d rather shut it down cause they dont want to sell it and let an American company see how they use and abuse it to gather information and manipulate behaviors.
As if an American company wouldn’t just pick up where they left off… have you seen Meta? The system needs regulation, not a change in ownership to preferred snoopers.
Maybe they are willing to sell and are just saying this to drive up the price.
Or maybe they don’t want a competitor to have access to their secret algorithm, and threaten them globally. This way they lose only one market.
Another possibility is that they will teach users how to use a VPN, and are confident that enough of their users will do it.
Or maybe they think saying they’re willing to shut down will make some of their users lobby against this bill / organise protests / call their representatives. (This probably won’t work.)
Companies are ultimately motivated by money. They will do whatever underhanded trick they can think up to get it.
They are free to sell to non American companies just fine as long as the new company is not ultimately controlled by the Chinese government.
That’s fine, but I think they are lying.
And in case you don’t understand, foreign corporations running FARA-unregistered influence operations isn’t considered a facet of “free speech” in the USA.
Okay great. Prove it in court.
There’s no legal case to be had.
The constitution grants congress effectively unlimited power to regulate international trade. Citizens have rights. Foreign actors do not.
That hasn’t been true for 70 years.
Extremely hostile business takeover by the government.
Don’t worry, It’s OK when the US does it.
U.S. wouldn’t be taking over… it could be a New Zealand company for all the u.s. cares.
Don’t threaten us with a good time!
