Musical.ly was started by entrepreneurs in Shanghai. Although it may have had US and Japanese investors, I don't think it was an American company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly
>"It’s the first company to be headquartered in China, designed in China, but popular in the US," said Greylock investor Josh Elman. "Finally we’re seeing talented people who live in that ecosystem in that world and actually transcend it and build products in the US."
I've heard this myth that musical.ly was founded in China before, but it's hard to believe if you look at some basic facts.
One cofounder worked full time at SAP in SF bay area for several years before and after musical.ly was founded. The other says on his LinkedIn that he was working in Santa Monica for several years on either side of the founding. They lived, worked, and founded the company in CA.
musical.ly appears to have always had its head office in Shanghai until the acquisition. The fact that it also had significant operations in California doesn't make it a US company. Only those operations are subject to US law and would have to be divested due to disapproval by CFIUS.
> musical.ly appears to have always had its head office in Shanghai until the acquisition.
That's not true. I have not found a specific date, but the Shanghai office did not exist at the time musical.ly was founded. I have not found any references to the Shanghai office from before late 2015.
I searched for the Chinese name of the company (found on Wikipedia-zh) and immediately found all the information about how the company was founded and funded.[1] It was founded in Shanghai on 2013-08-01.
Not being able to find any reference on the English-speaking part of the web doesn’t mean it couldn’t have existed.
Though I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that it's a myth when you're directly contradicting the first line of the first main paragraph of their wikipage (which is referenced)
"Musical.ly Inc. was founded by longtime friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China."
Neither do German (What you Americans call Jewish) or Russian/Ukrainian names sound English yet they are by far the biggest majority of your country way ahead of the Anglos. More likely than not a European American has its roots somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe.
That's true, of course. However, every source I can find says that the company was founded in Shanghai, but ended up being more successful in the American than the Chinese market, and opened up offices in California. Most of the engineers are supposedly in Shanghai, though. One more detail is that the founders appear to have worked in Silicon Valley before founding the company.
Whether any of this makes any difference, as far as US law goes, I don't know.
"TikTok also says China does not have jurisdiction over content of the app, which does not operate in China and is not influenced by any foreign government."
If it's a Chinese company, why is TikTok saying that China has zero jurisdiction over the app?
Besides that, the US can require that Bytedance peel off TikTok / Musical.ly. If Bytedance wants access to the US market with that app, it will have to play by US rules. That works similar to how China blocked the Qualcomm - NXP acquisition. Neither Qualcomm nor NXP are Chinese companies. If the combined entity wanted access to China they had to obey China's position on that acquisition. And given China's extreme behavior on restricting US Internet companies from their market, this is more than fair game.
> If it's a Chinese company, why is TikTok saying that China has zero jurisdiction over the app?
ByteDance is trying very hard to run TikTok and Douyin (抖音, the Chinese version) as separate companies that happen to share the same code but not data. For one, this is because they're well aware that Western governments are suspicious of foreign companies having access to their citizens' data. Secondly, having Chinese and international users on a shared platform also makes it more difficult to maintain the narrative mandated by the Chinese government, as each cross-border interaction is a potential hole in the Great Firewall.
After the lack of data separation effectively killed Grindr, they can only hope that they've done enough and won't suffer the same fate.
Not sure how they can do that in a reasonable way since it is not open source? And just because the data is not in China does not mean the Chinese government does not get access, it is more like the other way round. If the data is in China you can be sure they have full access.
> given China's extreme behavior on restricting US Internet companies from their market, this is more than fair game.
Except that the US always complained about this behavior from the Chinese government, but now it wants to adopt it as normal. It looks like the Chinese way of doing things is winning...
Weird that this is being downvoted. What is the US government going to do, create a China-style great firewall? Even the (right-) wingnuts would be sharpening their pitchforks.
If it was a website, maybe it can survive no matter what? But if they can get Google and Apple to take the app down in the US market, you effectively kill the app. I‘m sure some will sideload, but relatively speaking, it’ll be a small amt of people.
I haven’t checked the top sites in US list recently, but I imagine even for places that have sites on top of apps, losing App Store access will destroy a large part of the user base. Off the top of head, Google, the surviving portal sites, could survive. But even portal sites like Yahoo likely get enough traffic from apps that they’d be hit hard. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest. Maybe LinkedIn would go largely unscathed.
They will slowly craft some national security or human rights narrative over a 2 to 3 period after which the public, both left and right, will be begging for a firewall.
> Weird that this is being downvoted. What is the US government going to do, create a China-style great firewall? Even the (right-) wingnuts would be sharpening their pitchforks.
So, if I want access to EU market I can avoid GDPR and other European regulations so long as I keep my server out of Europe?
It doesn't matter, just like china reviews acquisitions of American companies by American companies because they do business in china the US does the same.
>"It’s the first company to be headquartered in China, designed in China, but popular in the US," said Greylock investor Josh Elman. "Finally we’re seeing talented people who live in that ecosystem in that world and actually transcend it and build products in the US."
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-musically-2016-5