The media and HN seem to be seeing this as a AT&T style breakup, which is not. It is starting with an Alphabet style restructuring, which sounds big in theory but nothing big might happen in practice. The biggest unit (Taobao/Tmall) will be fully owned by Alibaba and would not seek any external investment (Taobao/Tmall is responsible for >70% of their profits). The new Unit CEOs were not even invited to speak at the announcement. Even if all the new Units sell 10-20% stock to the market, would it really change too many things? It will all depend on how the CCP wants the breakup to play out.
Also the reason the stock jumped on the news is the company is potentially worth more this way, by breaking out higher margin / faster growth units from the big retail business. A lot of Amazon investors would love to see the same with AWS.
It sounds silly since nothing really changes, but it has to do with the way investors calculate the value of public companies.
Yeah I saw this happen with a business I was involved with.
Split up each business could be valued with direct competition in market and the same PE ratios applied to evaluate value and market cap. It caused a noticeable jump in overall stock value while nothing actually changed other than how businesses reported to the market.
This sounds good in theory but might not work in practice. None of them are profitable and depended on Tmall/Taobao for growth. Turning to the public markets would require sacrificing growth for profitability. There might be many other inter dependencies which might turn out costly to unwind.
What you are saying might be how it turns out in the end, but it is not a given.
Endless growth of unprofitable services is what has given us crazy market distortions in the past. It's what gave us things like Groupon, Doordash, and Uber, too. Growth isn't always a good goal.
Agreed. This is a restructure so that CCP can show they have caused changes and for Alibaba to appear to acquiesce to instructions. Corporate “window dressing” basically.
If the units all get too independent, based on my view at ground level in China, is that they will all get more powerful in their respective markets. Nobody was happy with the value erasure.
On the other hand a fuckton of value has been irrevocably erased - entire ed tech sector isn't coming back to pre crackdown levels. If anything CCP hasn shown little regard for crippling soft tech since it will redirect talent towards strategic hard tech where job and wages have been booming. Baba getting proper rectification if it incentivizes future talent to reorient towards SMIC seems to be part of the plan.
I'm not an expert on this, but from what I gather this all leads back to a power struggle between Jack Ma and Xi Jinping. Ma was ready to go public with AliPay and in the build up to it made a speech that criticised the government regulation as being out of date. This was viewed as a challenge to the governments power. Over the next few months the government moved to tighten regulations on companies like AliPay and disappeared Jack Ma. The government since then has basically completely taken over his entire empire, and sliced it up into pieces. This is basically Xi sending the message that private business in China will always defer to the government. All of this has natural absolutely tanked the value of China's tech sector. So people are hoping that now the worst of it is done and they no longer have enormous tech giants, but a series of smaller companies, that the government will return to being more hands off and in turn those smaller companies can return to more natural valuations.
Also, one of Ma’s last public appearances was at an American conference, maybe TechCrunch but I’m not sure, where he said in an on stage interview something to the effect of, “I’m not afraid of the CCP”, in relation to recent revelations he was a CCP member. Then he got disappeared shortly after. He was really clueless about what kind of org he was dealing with.
One doesn't need to be clueless in order to lose a power struggle. He might have been betrayed, he might have overestimated the resources he could fully count on, he might have simply been backing a faction in the party that ended up losing. Xi Jinping went as far as kicking out of the public congress a previous president, which was unprecedented; who knows what else he's capable of.
But that’s the problem - the risk of losing a power struggle in a democracy with rule of law, separation of powers, an independent court system, and regular elections is vastly different from the risks of losing a power struggle in the CCP, which controls all branches of government, law enforcement, and the military and is accountable to no one.
The former has a limited downside, the latter unlimited. Whatever the Central Committee decides happens to you is law with no recourse - execution, disappearing and re-education, etc. - and law enforcement and the courts are just there to justify it after the fact.
It’s clueless to publicly mouth off about the CCP if you’re a high-profile influential Chinese billionaire and therefore a potential threat to the current ruling faction, or some future ruling faction when there’s turnover. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor there.
I always figured that's why high-level power struggles were so constant and severely fought in totalitarian regimes.
If the downside is unlimited then you do whatever it takes to win, always.
And if there isn't currently a struggle then you prepare for the next one, constantly.
Or in other words, you only spend a small portion of your total ability and time on the job, because you have to constantly expend effort on protecting your back.
I have that impression too. Without having directly experienced it myself, it seems like a hellish system. Though it does at least seem like getting “purged” isn’t always final, and that execution is the last choice.
Xi Jinping himself got purged in his youth and spent that time living and working in the countryside and building his ‘man of the common people’ cred, then made it back into the CCP’s favor later. Though Xi was a princeling, his father was one of Mao’s inner circle, so he might have been untouchable and only at risk of exile and not actual execution for that reason, unlike most other CCP members and Chinese people.
And to be fair, US politicians spend most of their time fundraising for their next campaign, so in terms of total ability and time spent on the job it’s probably similar in both systems. But losing a power struggle in the US just means losing your election, and trying again in the next one. In the CCP there’s a wider range of consequences.
For anybody looking to get some understanding of Xi Jinping's life and ascension to power, I'd recommend listening to "The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping" from the Economist: https://www.economist.com/theprincepod
As reasonable as your argument is, let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely?
1. Jack Ma knows things you don't, and those things made mouthing off seem worthwhile to him. Still, he miscalculated, but not out of sheer cluelessness.
2. You, HN commenter, understand Chinese politics and power better than Jack Ma, a prominent Chinese billionaire. He is clueless.
Though I would argue that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is not that Ma was being calculating and strategic, but that he just got cocky and said something dumb in the moment. He let all the global feting of his rise from schoolteacher to China's richest man go to his head, made an all-too-human mistake, and said something inadvisable.
He may even have been trying to defend the CCP in that moment, trying to communicate to US audiences that the CCP doesn't need to be feared because it's not scary, and thus he himself didn't fear it. But Xi and the powers that be interpreted it differently, and disappeared him. Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.
>Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.
No, you just get arrested by the authorities, and later committed suicide before the trial.
Missing option (3). Jack Ma, prominent billionaire, was surrounded by kiss-asses for the past 5-10 years. In doing so, he developed a distorted sense of his own intelligence/power/allies which caused him to make a calculation about the current state of Chinese politics and power that is obviously false to an outside observer.
See also, Twitter is was not worth $44 billion in 2022.
Missing option (4). If you have billions, sacrificing a lot of wealth and power to do something you want is just another valid option.
See also, sacrificing 20% of your net worth to support "freedom of speech" is a reasonable choice, especially if you are left with an objective fortune.
Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks like he is willing to lose a big chunk of his net worth to change Twitter, but his intent seems to be to promote certain speech and suppress other speech, or as he would say, to kill the "woke mind virus".
It’s worth noting that Elon unbanned a whole slew of accounts that had been silenced simply for disagreeing with what happen to be your political priorities. Who has Elon banned for their politics? Being banned for tweeting Andy Ngo’s current home address is very different from being banned for saying that COVID-19 likely originated in a laboratory.
He suspended ADSBExchange and Elonjet. Accounts sharing open source and public data that he didn’t like. He went so far as to specifically ban the use of the link to his jet on Twitter.
FWIW I know it’s his right to do this as he owns the platform but it is relevant in the context of “but Elon didn’t do X”
It doesn't matter for what we're talking about if Elon's "freedom of speech" is an ironic take on people only being able to listen to him or actual freedom or whatever. The point is, blowing 44 billion USD on a hobby/for a point he cares about is a reasonable cost for him (and Bezos. Maybe a few others)
From what I’ve both read and experienced on a brief trip to Shanghai, it seems there are two main factions - the Beijing faction and Shanghai faction. The latter is more capitalist and chill, the former more authoritarian. It’s probably more complicated though, with multiple sub factions around different leaders in the CCP. Maybe someone with deeper knowledge can elaborate.
> One doesn't need to be clueless in order to lose a power struggle.
But one has to be clueless in order to start a power struggle with Xi. He's not like the old school CCP head at all (not even Mao), he's much more of an all-powerful tyrant like Stalin was. Starting a power struggle against such a ruthless despot is clueless.
In the “single person handling all power” sense, I'd say so at least for most of Mao's reign.
Political struggles where commonplace during most of the Mao era, and it wasn't until the end of his reign (in 1969, amidst the cultural revolution) that Mao
came to gain complete power over the central committee. (And by that time, he had done most of its harm already)
Two of the most historically important event of the period even happened after Mao lost a power struggle and was trying to get back on his foot: the great march and the cultural revolution.
That is my exact point. I don't think it is reasonable to assume he wasn't aware that it was a risk.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to conclude that people are idiots simply because you don't understand their actions after a moment of thought and with no information.
Doubly so when you have someone who grew up through the cultural revolution, lived in China for 60 years, and is a Communist Party member.
Ma is no idiot, and he knows how the system works or Alibaba would never have become a titan, but I think when you get to a certain level of power / money I it warps your perception of what's risky and you overestimate how much you can get away with because of your own sense of invincibility. Musk is a pretty good example of this.
So yeah, I would retract what I said about him being clueless, more like careless and overconfident.
I can tell you that no one in China was surprised when Ma got smacked down; we've seen this same thing play out over the past decade.
When it comes to Ma or Musk, I think it easy to backseat, and project how we would have acted to get the outcome we would want. This ignores the reality that we don't actually know what their motivations and priorities are.
The relevant question is if Ma was actually surprised with the smackdown, or realized it was a possible/likely outcome, and chose to proceed anyways. You seem to think Ma made a mistake, maybe so, but maybe he would make the same choice again given the same chances.
Both Ma and Musk have FU money. They have both made choices that cost them money, but we can only guess at if they actually see their choices as mistakes. They are both still multi-billionaires, so their mistakes haven't been bad enough to cost them their lives or fortunes.
If you had 20 or 200B in the bank, would you let financial risks govern every decision you make? What price tag would you put on speaking your mind or living the life you want to live? How many billion would you gamble on a long shot? Being insanely wealthy probably makes people overconfident, but it absolutely makes some people more willing to take financial risks.
Im not saying Musk or Ma are right all the time, but I don't think it is right to judge everything through a financial lens, with hindsight, and no insider information on motivation. I think that anyone who pretends to know what Ma was thinking is overestimating their knowledge and ability.
Given China's, (and to some extent, Asia's), obsession with face, his actions do all seem pretty clueless. I wonder, could it all be part of some performance?
The fact that they let Ali "voluntarily" restructure, and save face from having it be enforced, is interesting on it's own. I'm not really sure what to make of it.
It's only a cliche, because westerners are often just as obsessed with face, though having a foot in two cultures there are a few big places where the difference is noticable:
US (and by extension NATO, doctrinally) military is very unconcerned with face in the small. For (real example) anyone on the bridge of a US ship can report to the captain of a ship that the ship is out of position (for an exercise). A buddy almost got walloped on the bridge of a ROK ship for doing that. They didn't because he was American and that's what exchanges are for.
some cultures in the west tend to value bluntness over face in the small.
Yea I remember an HN post from a US pilot trainer explaining the same culture problem in Korea in the aftermath of the Asiana airlines crash at SFO. But I see that as more of a hierarchy problem rather than saving face.
Jack Ma is part of the evidence -- there are others who have said the same thing. There are many examples of less notoriety of people saying bad things about CCP and then "disappearing" (many government officials).
We don't need to resort to cultural tropes like "face" to explain this.
This is about power and control. The Communist party does not want any other centers of power or control to emerge which might challenge the party. Jack Ma, and the tech industry in general, was emerging as such a power. Now that problem has been taken care of.
Jack Ma truly is clueless in general. There was a talk involving him and Elon Musk and it somehow was Elon coming out as the eloquent one in that conversation.
I don't think very highly of Jack Ma, but eloquence for non-native speakers should be judged very differently, especially for someone coming from a language very far away linguistically.
Exactly, Ma was kinda struggling to get a train of thought across linguistically and half the time when Musk interrupted him he was rather making fun of some poor choice of words and being like "lol whatever" than trying to actually engage in a conversation.
And I guess now with the Twitter shitshow Musk doesn't exactly look like a genius either.
Well it increases revenue, so certainly. The open sourcing increases its ethicality; I guess you could say it's not direct value.
In terms of pure market cap, which I'm not sure how relevant it is, it seems that the current valuation (41 billion) is higher than when he offered to buy it (34 billion in April 2022).
I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.
Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels.
However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame.
> However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame.
He's a narcissist. People used to worship him - and given just how hard Tesla kicked the butts of the ICE car industry or how SpaceX just completely obliterated Boeing/ULA, rightfully. But let's be honest, both are mainstream now and don't get as much attention as they once did... and then, his wife leaves him for Chelsea Manning and one of his children comes out as trans and sticks the finger to him.
A bad enough combination of events for normal people to handle (getting dumped by a partner is one of the chief causes that sends people into depression and other mental health disaster loops), but for a narcissist with no real support structure to fall back on and already on the edge? No surprise he blames everyone but himself and allies with those that are against those whom he feels "wronged" by: the far-right.
Note, this doesn't excuse any of his actions. He needs to come out of this rabbit hole either by himself or, when he finally hits rock bottom and commits something that he can't just buy himself out of prison, by the government.
> he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck.
The odds of any given entrepreneur getting lucky several times in a row is very small.
Given a large enough entrepreneurs, the odds of one of them getting lucky several times in a row gets very large. We just don't see all the ones who tried and failed, or succeeded once or twice and fizzled out.
I don't doubt that Musk has some skills and appropriate personality traits as well, but luck is likely the dominating factor.
Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.
> There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of.
What an hilarious amount of bad faith! What drives you to resent him that much? Envy? It's okay: he's achieved a lot, but maybe you can too if you work at it.
> I think Musk is a bad person, but I don't carry any particular resentment or anger towards him.
Then maybe you should scrutinize who you get your information from: intelligent people who have worked with Musk, or random journalists and forumers that repeat talking points such as "this immense success over several decades of active executive role is just pure luck".
> However, I think it's an unhelpful mindset for others to believe that Musk is some sort of model for entrepreneurial success.
What an interesting thing to think! The person with arguably the greatest track record of entrepeneurial success alive should, under no occasion, be taken as some sort of model for entrepreneurial success. If you have contenders for this position, I'm interested.
As an external observer, I don't square the two different conclusions in your first statement: "equate wealth with ability", "everybody is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
There is a far stronger underpinning to the American attitude to wealth: It's not "equate wealth with ability", it's more "equate wealth with virtue and morality" - that the owners of wealth "did something right" generally has nothing to do with ability. Even the founders of Hewlett-Packard aren't remembered for their technological advances but for the "HP Way", a marker of virtue rather than business acumen.
The absolute veneration of "hard work" as a marker of success over connections/which hoo-ha you accidentally fell out of is rarely raised, despite their being overwhelming evidence that to be successfull in the US, you have to be born on 3rd base.
When it comes down to it, it should be absolutely no surprise that these billionaires with feet of clay rarely live up to the image that is built for them by the fanboys. Musk's family had a history of bizarre, he has simply not fallen far from the tree.
People thought he had some engineering skills, until he took over Twitter and started talking about all the idiotic engineering decisions he was making.
Musk could simultaneously be a numpty at Twitter and a superb engineer at SpaceX.
You imply that skills are context-free black or white - that is a terrible way to think about people or the world IMHO. And you can’t ignore changes over time either.
Not the kind of engineering numpty he's shown himself to be. All engineering absolutely requires humility for situations outside the realm of your expertise.
But, the fact that he so clearly doesn't know when he is out of his depth in the first place is the real tell.
Like management, engineering is a discipline of means divorced from ends. There are certain vital skills that are shared amongst engineers regardless of their particular domain, and those are the skills most important for an engineering manager to have.
A computer engineer without those skills is merely an amateur physicist. That's enough knowledge to light things on fire. A software engineer without those skills is merely a programmer. Ask a quant with no engineering background to put their ad-hoc scripts into production one day and let's see how that goes once other people start depending on it.
Musk might know some science, maybe he's written some scripts in his day, but none of that makes him an engineer. He's proven he doesn't know the first thing about keeping a lit boiler from exploding.
I seriously doubt his engineering abilities, but I'll ignore that.
One thing he's demonstrated from the beginning is a stark undersupply of emotional intelligence. There are noises that come out of his mouth that my 15yr old would roll her eyes at for being too self-centered and immature.
Based on what exactly? Are you sure you aren't confusing EQ with agreeableness, they are orthogonal. Hitler had extremely high EQ, but low agreeability
The Twitter purchase really just shows how rich and apathetic Elon Musk is. A Ferrari is a difficult to impossible purchase for almost all of us, but rappers buy them for no reason and then trash them all the time. Twitter is that on a much larger scale, and Musk is treating it the same way because he doesn’t care.
You don’t build the first successful auto startup in 70 years and revitalize the space industry by being a moron. Everything Elon Musk has ever done with Twitter (including the 2018 SEC debacle) has been the dumbest shit possible, however
Don't know why you went to rappers. When Musk first got rich, he bought a $million car and immediately destroyed it, uninsured, nearly killing himself and Peter Thiel. Imagine if he succeeded.
Both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt multiple times, we could just as easily be talking about an Elon Musk who had every advantage (government contracts, huge tax breaks and a fantastically wealthy family) and still failed. Maybe this is a case of fortune favoring the bold and I admire his perseverance/grit/marketing ability a lot. I've never heard him explain anything technical in any interview he's ever given and instead just starts behaving autistic if he's asked any detail about things. When he does stray into technical subjects like Twitter code he seems to talk nonsense that any engineer who has worked at a Twitter scale company would laugh at.
He's really good at selling an image, which is what pushed Tesla ahead of other car makers. His whole 'Tony Stark' image is basically cat nip to tech bros and made Tesla cool and desirable.
I think you are spot on. There are dozens of 'Elon Musks' out there we don't notice or talk about because they didn't win. Someone was going to win in the space, the government was heavily incentivizing electric car purchases. Musk was the best salesmen and here we are. That doesn't make him a tactical genius.
Yeah, it's informal but it used mostly for when a government illegally detains someone, often incommunicado --though historically in Latin American countries "disappearances" were a euphemism for government paramilitary forces (or revolutionary forces) taking someone behind the shed and extrajudicially executing them or in lesser cases locking them up in secret prisons. The choice of word probably stems from the stereotypical middle of the night night unwitnessed arrest. (so and so was supposed to come home at 8 but never came back)
In Argentina, one of the countries (along with Chile) where the term "desaparecido" (disappeared) was coined in the 70s, it means specifically:
Government forces (not revolutionaries) which use either their official militaries/police (often) or their secret police (less often) to detain individuals without recourse to the law, then take them to illegal detention centers where they are tortured and eventually killed (in Argentina, some detainees were simply drugged and dropped alive to the Río de la Plata river, where they drowned -- our so called "flights of death" -- and others sometimes simply shot). The key thing that sets "disappeared" people aside from other ways of execution is that there is no official acknowledgement of their fate, and their friends and family are never truly sure of how they died unless their mortal remains are ever found by chance.
If this sounds horrifying, always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government, in things like the School of the Americas [1], under the guise of "learning how to fight insurgency".
nice try to pin the blame on the USA - of course USA is guilty, but also, who chooses this path.. You cannot say that the people who do this themselves, to their own, are not responsible.
So you basically understand the US is guilty, but somehow assumed I was saying the people on Latin America who used this training to murder their own people are innocent?
Of course it requires two things: murderers and those willing to train and support them.
PS: "nice try" my ass. This piece of history I'm telling you is widely acknowledged, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.
To be clear: I do consider our dictators and murderers as worse people than those who trained them in the School of the Americas. Because, like you rightly put it, "who chooses this path?".
We (The USA) are incredibly guilty of a lot of poor actions and choices in South America. Including active funding & training of multiple regime leaders over decades.
It's hard to choose a good path if a major world power is making sure all the good ones get shut down.
agree fully - that is why it is crucial that we have checks and balances on uniformed services, public process and the ability to speak out here. There were long and serious protests about the School of the Americas by US citizens in public. Here in this international discussion, it is not complete or wholly accurate IMHO to say "the USA did it" without knowing some context.
> it is not complete or wholly accurate IMHO to say "the USA did it" without knowing some context
But this isn't what I said. I definitely didn't say "the USA did it". What I said was:
> always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government
Which is both fair and accurate. The US was definitely involved one way or the other in most Latin American dictatorships of that era, enabling atrocities under the guise of fighting communism and insurgencies in their "back yard".
To be even more specific the phrase is most associated with the dirty war and Argentina’s military dictatorship and their habit of taking people they didn’t like up in helicopters and pushing them out a few miles off shore into the ocean. They just vanished without a trace.
They were called los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) and for years once a week their mothers would silently carry photos of them and walk in circles at the Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires.
Everyone loves Magical Trevor
'Cause the tricks that he does are ever so clever
Look at him now, disappearin' the cow
Where is the cow hidden right now?
Presumably because Alibaba - the challenger that started this crackdown - is now slain.
On a political level, there are only so many Chinese companies with enough power to actually threaten the CCP, and Alibaba is probably enough of an example to keep them in line - further crackdowns are probably unnecessary.
Must be nice for international companies to know that Chinese companies will always be restrained from becoming too large. It’s like they have to fight with one arm tied behind their back - get too big and your own government will cut you up.
xi jinping has been criticised for this but he's in his "my legacy lives on forever" phase of life.
another decade and he's done - just consolidating power for his family at this point.
Well, the problem was that Jack Ma was getting so powerful by being in charge of a massive tech empire he was threatening the CCP's power. The remaining split up companies are no where near as big or powerful, are staffed largely by people who have been put in by the CCP, and now know what happens to people who criticise the government. They've made their point, so the question is... why not ease up a bit and let prosperity return. Look at the absurd hype around AI in the US right now, I'd imagine the CCP would be quite worried that they're going to lose a strategic position in this technology if they don't ease up.
Also, they've just got to ease up at some point right?
>>Also, they've just got to ease up at some point right?
Nope. There is absolutely nothing (other than whatever good judgement they might have) that would prevent them from flying the entire craft straight into the ground.
Agree that the problem for Jack Ma was he was becoming a threat to CCP power. He may have been able to pull it off and make a new countervailing power, but he spoke up too soon and CCP/Xi figured out the threat and took action. Maybe another player will be smart enough to stay below the radar for much longer, but it'll be years if not decades
I think on some level people implicitly believe that the Chinese govt will choose prosperity over power because that's what they imagine they would do. I suspect that will never happen.
No, it's because that's what the previous generation of Chinese leaders did. Post-Mao, party elites have largely chosen wealth over power at critical junctures, maintaining an overall equilibrium. Xi Jinping broke that setup: there is no elite anymore, only himself; and he's made a point that wealth cannot be used as a shield from his power.
It’s interesting because the other contender for general secretary at the time, Bo Xilai, was even more outwardly Maoist. So I suppose something was bound to happen to that equilibrium.
And I suspect you are right as long as current leaders wield the power. Periodical purges in all ranks of power and society are a time-tested feature of communist regimes. Without them the party cadres grow stale and lose their revolutional vigor. I can imagine it's a bit similar to how the free market works, with companies going bankrupt or taken over all the time, only there it's the changing conditions and the 'invisible hand of the market', while in communist dictatorships it's always intentional and directed (and way more brutal), because the rigid system does not self-regulate, at least not the way the leaders would like.
Prosperity IS power, but the chinese have a bunch of evil morons (as do most governments) in place that are more concerned with personal wealth than long term prosperity -- however, ironically, they are succeeding in a long term plan to basically own manufacturing for the planet.
The USA is different in that the political fabric is myopically focused on personal individual wealth growth in a very short sighted obsession with only being re-elected usch that they can insider graft/trade and expand personal/familial wealth.
The fact that we dont even openly talk about this problem... is the problem.
Nancy pelosi (and family, dont think for a second she doesnt share her insidere trading info with her close circle, including her son who has also grifting business in ukraine.) is a prime example.
Wasn't there also something about Alibaba specifically working on a money lending scheme which circumvented banking regulations and which regulators feared would create vast amounts of unsecured debt and destabilize the economy?
Yes, the original argument was essentially sparked because AliPay was doing a bunch of lending that wasn't really compliant with regulations and there was some discussion about whether the regulators would step in before the IPO. That's what caused Ma's speech about how the regulations were out of date. Whether that concerns was legitimate? Who knows.
Because there is now an understanding of who the actual regulators are and what the legal process to operate a tech company within the PRC is.
When we talk about anti-trust and tech industry policy in the US, we know by default that means that it's going to involve the FTC (M&A), SEC (Accounting/Financing Practices), and the House+Senate Judiciary Committee (review M&A, Financing, and Accounting Practices decided by FTC+SEC)
The Chinese tech industry in the 2010s had a number of competing regulators - China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Cyberspace Administration of China, State Administration for Market Regulation, People's Bank of China, etc.
Because there are so many regulators/agencies stepping on each others toes, there was a lot of intrigue and bad practices in the Chinese tech industry from 2000-2020 (eg. Crypto companies like FTX and Binance bribing PBOC officials and AntPay arguing that as a FinTech it should be regulated as a tech company/by the MIIT and not financial regulators)
During 2019-2022, there was a massive regulatory reform across the board that divvied up the roles of individual agencies and created the norms that startups and companies needed to follow.
The resolution of Ant Group's whole saga is basically setting precedent on which agencies/regulators within the PRC do what, and now investors have an easier time understanding how to vet investment risks in the tech sector.
Because Investors (capital I) are children with no long-term memory who think they're special. Or they have faith (misplaced IMO) that Xi will do the rational thing, which in their minds is "thing that makes money". Because China has no history of sacrificing its economy/peoples' quality of life for political reasons, or collapsing age demographics, nope it's all just one long glorious period of Deng Xiaoping-style openness (never-mind the man's direction was "hide your strength, bide your time") and over a billion potential consumers!!!
Anyone putting money into a Chinese company is betting that Xi and the CCP will allow said company to do things that make them money, and won't sacrifice said company for political gain. Good luck with that! The beatings will continue until regulation stops US investment in China altogether, and then the Investors will whine about it to no end.
They prefer individual businesses not to get to big, monopolistic or dominant across multiple sectors, as this would give the business undue influence over politics? And of course they're operating on the idea that the political sphere governs the market and not that the biggest businesses should be the most powerful lobbiests.
So this is an end to it because it effectively neuters the one super company by making it into several more easily regulated companies?
It is my understanding that China has a long history (hundreds of years at least) of the government keeping merchant power in check, lest it lead to unrest due high levels of inequality. This is why China didn’t see Capitalist primative accumulation in the early modern period.
China had a brief nearly capitalist period with the Song Dynasty, building on growth during the Tang Dynasty, but the Song royal line, an Achilles heel of any monarchic empire, started to break down in the early 13th century, which contributed to the Mongol conquest. The next three dynasties were highly corrupt: the Yuan was overtly colonial, treating natives as an underclass; the Ming got off to a strong start but by the mid-1400s were consumed by palace intrigue and repressed the study of algebra (which was available via Islamic Central Asia) due to xenophobia; the Qing were an ethnostate again with some early Han defectors classified as "honorary Manchu", which may have inspired the "honorary Marleyan" motif in Attack on Titan.
> this would give the business undue influence over politics?
It's about power. From the article:
> Communist authorities dislike the idea of anything, let alone a large private business, outshining the party. And the country’s leaders bristled at the high profile of Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, an icon of Chinese enterprise who every now and again dared question their decisions.
I think this is the wrong question, it is not " when it comes to China’s government.".
It is the investor you should be questioning. And if you are cynical, ( Comparatively speaking, in US terms ), Wall Street will use anything as an excuses to get the results they want.
In terms of demographic Chinese population has now started declining. So China is no longer in need of aggressive, exploitative model of capitalism they were following for last few decades because they needed job growth at any cost.
To western eyes suddenly Alibaba seems to be kind of hero standing up to authoritarian government but from what I read what really got Alibaba in govt crosshairs was its predatory finance business. I don't think any country would have liked this type of business but many would've tolerated because "free enterprise / follow the law" thinking.
So the way I see this is "law taking its course" Chinese way and proactively taking action against business which could be socially bad in future.
Either way, it means more levers of control by the CCP, which is not positive if you're trying to run a business. It introduces more uncertainty if nothing else, which is a negative.
Upon settling in the countryside, I saw firsthand the power of dripping water drilling through rock. That image, which captured the spirit of persistence, has stayed with me all these years. It has become a well-worn source for contemplating life and movement.
Rock and water are two opposing elements that are used to symbolize dogged stubbornness and gentle fluidity. Yet despite being “gentle,” water will drill through “solid” rock over time.
As a metaphor for people, this is the embodiment of a certain moral character: it is the willingness to rise to fight each time one falls and the courage to sacrifice oneself. A single drop of water is small and insubstantial. It will die a cruel “death” in any battle with a rock. Yet in that brief moment of “sacrifice,” even though it cannot see its own value and achievement, it is embodied within the countless drops of water that have already fallen, and the triumph of finally drilling through the rock. From the perspective of history or development of an economically disadvantaged area, we should not seek personal success and fame. Instead, we should strive to make steady progress one small step at a time and be willing to lay the groundwork for overall success. When everyone doing our work models themselves on a droplet that is ready to sacrifice for the greater good, we need not worry that our work is not important enough to make lasting change!
As a metaphor for things, dripping water is a demonstration of dialectical principles that use softness to overcome hardness, and the weak to control the strong. I believe in the invaluable spirit of that drop of water, which bravely goes into the breach with no thought of retreat. Those of us who are involved in economic development will inevitably encounter complications in our work. We can either rise to the challenge or flinch and run away. It all depends on whether we have the courage to adhere to philosophical materialism. If we allow ourselves to be filled with trepidation, the kind of fear that comes from standing at the edge of an abyss or treading on thin ice, we will lack the courage to do anything. We will accomplish nothing. Nevertheless, courage alone is not enough.
When dripping water takes aim at a rock, each droplet zeroes in on the same target and stays the course until its mission is complete. The drops of water fall day after day, year after year. This is the magic that enables dripping water to drill through rock! How can it be that our economic development work is any different? Just look at areas where the economy is lagging. Historical, environmental, and geographical factors have all played a part in holding back development. There are no shortcuts. Nothing can change overnight. Instead, we need to focus on the long haul by turning quantitative changes into qualitative changes. We need to be the dripping water that drills through rock. When talking about reform and opening up, we cannot assume that help will be coming from left and right, nor can we afford to wait until conditions are perfect enough to ensure success. Instead of building palaces in the air, we need to square our shoulders and get down to work. When talking about economic development, we cannot simply race to build high-rises and open up big factories, nor can we focus on dramatic results at the expense of necessary infrastructure. Otherwise, success will be elusive, and opportunities will be easily missed.
Instead of daydreaming about overly ambitious or flashy projects, we need to have a firm footing in reality as we take concrete steps to reach long-term goals. Instead of “setting three fires” in the hope they will succeed, we need to work steadily and make solid progress. Our work calls for the tenacity to keep chipping away. Working by fits and starts will not get us anywhere.
When I describe my awe upon seeing the power of droplets drilling through rock, I am praising those who have the willingness to rise each time one falls, and the moral character to sacrifice for overall success. I am expressing my admiration for those who develop a solid plan and then have the tenacity to see it through to the end.
China's government has been cracking down on its tech industry for some time now, and this has created uncertainty for investors. However, recent moves by the government, such as the approval of new video game titles and the easing of regulations for foreign investors, have been seen as positive signals for the industry.
It's important to note that the Chinese government is not monolithic, and different factions within it may have different goals and priorities. The recent actions that have been perceived as positive by investors may reflect a shift in priorities or strategy by certain government officials or agencies.
It's interesting to contrast China's approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.
There's no bright, clear separation between governments and corporations in America.
Corporate execs regularly get jobs in government, and often wind up "regulating" the very industries/companies they came from. It's also an open secret in Washington that when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs in the very companies they regulated or provided government contracts to.
It's a revolving door between corporations and governments, and it's misleading to think the one is truly separate from the other.
A better model is to look at the corporate-government interaction as competing elites vying with one another for money, power, and influence, and just as often collaborating with each other on shared interests.
Hmm I don't follow. Governments and corporations are organizations of people. Just because people move between them doesn't mean they aren't different.
The origin, abilities, aims, and accountability are different.
> elementary and high school are the same its just different people moving between them competing for status.
This doesn't seem persuasive to me. Describing what some people do while in an organization doesn't define the organization.
Why not include universities in that list?
Governments exists to manage violence and through law. Corporations exist because they outcompete individuals for subsistence.
Dont forget the revolving door with intelligence agencies and social media...
Recall the FB head of security that was walked out of the building at MPW for sexually harrasing/inappropriate actions
Or the other head of security who came from NSA, then left FB to go back to NSA, to leave NSA and go back to FB?
Or the time that FB built a 'government liason office' in DC?
Or the time that zuck employed ex SS agents as his personal guard?
Or the time CNN admitted to having CIA handlers on the editing staff (remember the quashing of the epstein story by media, because the CIA told them to)
Or the time when Maxwell, who was media heiress' daughter of double mossad agent was convicted of trafficking kids to REDACTED
Or the time it was reported that the FBI and twitter had an open channel on what, who, when to censor information?
Or when Cisco was required by the NSA to incorporate backdoors in all routing devices for them...
Or when the CIA intercepted CISCO devices en-route to [FOREIGN ADVERSARY] to install physical back-doors into said routers? (mid 1990s)
Or when AT&T was required to install carnivore in SF IDF on Folsom (same building that served the nascient startup 'Twitter')
Or when NSA required Intel to install certain security instruction sets for monitoring code/exploits
Or when it was announced that Twitter had a 'firehose' of all tweets to the library of congress (NSA) for sentiment mining...
Or the time when the most public pedo, aside from BBC's Saville, MITs big donor Epstein was called out for having Marvin FN Minsky in his clientelle - and the fact that a podcast revealed the big BDSM culture of MIT. (I cant find this video for some reason)
Or the time that a c-founder of reddit was suicided for allegedly stealing reasearch papers, but really was going to reveal the ties to pedo elite via the grift at MIT...
Or the time that every session on netflix/prime is a PR campaign for how bad-ass and rogue an ex CIA/NSA/COP can be when he is pursuing the current narrative and constant movies about clandestine operations is made to emotionally drive you to sympathizing with our good looking, adept, secret agents who are saving society from raving lunatics... literally 50% of movies/shows on these platforms are pushing the PR narrative of just how bad-ass a single CIA/NSA/COP agent can be.... else, watch many of the shows that are literally called lucifer... so many weird evil shows....
Or the time when CERBERUS investment group bought MAE-WEST (1st street san jose) and forced them to install carnivor to monitor internet traffic
Or when they sold it after install
Or when they bought PAIX (the Palo Alto Internet Exchange) which convenietly routed all network traffic through that facility AND also had international fiber terminated there AND AND also was the primary IX on the west coast (not MAE-WEST) as it had international and secret lab traffic - so they monitored all out of Stanford...
There are so many data points, and if like data, then pay attention to the points that matter, such as the above.
Yeah - corp-gov is so intertwined in the US its nuts. Actually insane - as its a third-rail to even discuss in media.
The PRC as a government makes the calls that it does because it is one of the vehicles of power by which the CCP operates. Remember that constitutionally the CCP is above the government, the law and the PLA and therefore the highest offices of power within mainland China are not any of the Executive offices of government but the political offices (General Secretary of the CCP, the Politburo and the members of the standing committee).
The People’s Liberation Army, People’s Armed Police and Militia answer to the Central Military Commission which is subordinate directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
It isn’t like the United States or Europe or even Japan or Korea. Your basic assumptions vis a vis how we work and therefore how they must work will never work when trying to serve as a proper lens for interpreting the PRC because the PRC is itself an institution subordinate to a Party which considers all aspects of Chinese society both public and private subordinate to the Party including State, Religion and the activities families and businesses of their subjects which in their eyes doesn’t stop at the border if you are of Chinese descent.
So if a business like Alibaba or a businessman like Jack Ma is challenging anything about that framework, or the laws of the PRC and policies of the CCP, they can’t afford to let that stand because the most important thing to them is maintaining their internal cohesion and power. Everything else is secondary or tertiary.
China can't print money and go in infinite debt mode like the US does?
The government needs to recover from COVID.
Perspective:
As leader the in control, I see there's a company that has the largest payment network in the country. Well that can't happen. I need a slice of it. So let's "regulate" it.
It isn’t clear if SOE debt should be considered public or private debt. On the one hand, these are often publicly traded companies, in the other hand everyone assumes their debt is implicitly guaranteed by the government. Localities will often load up local SOEs with debt when they need to do something for public interest, like build a subway or road. So China’s public debt situation is really murky.
Debt can only be debt if you believe there exists profits. There are companies that buy and sell off each other to produce "income". A lot of the numbers are inflated or completely cooked.
I came across a comment that resonated with me and seems relevant in this context, so I saved it. It says:
"The arc of communism is long and it leans towards oppressing the fuck out of people. It’s a tendency of all governmental systems. Communism rests most of its power in the hands of government without a moneyed elite to oppose them, so it tends to move to authoritarianism faster and with less resistance."
This is the idea of Republicanism: strengthen the nobility to oppose the king. It's not necessarily a bad idea, depending on who is oppressing you more at the moment. However, the nobility is always in love with it for self-serving reasons completely independent of the underlying facts so it's important to develop an independent opinion on the matter that is specific to your situation rather than jumping for every bit of self-serving speculation that (for example) single payer healthcare today will lead to gulags tomorrow, or that allowing companies to dump toxic chemicals or banks to take more risk etc will make you more free.
I'm not accusing you of making those silly arguments, but those silly arguments are a frequent end of this line of reasoning, so they are worth watching out for.
Because the way it breaks up, it doesn't feel like it is to fight against monopoly, more like the gov not wanting a business empire that becomes too influential.
Since it breaks down by divisions, so for example taobao would still be the top e-commerce competitor. Not to mention, despite being huge, I can't say Alibaba has monopoly in any of their services.
There is no rule of law, that's the indicator of authoritarianism.
In the US, if the FTC decides to block your merger or the government wants to split up a company, the company can bring the government to court, on a equal footing and argue it's case.
The US breaks up companies when they abuse their position to unfairly advantage themselves in our market. China just disappeared its most successful businessperson and chopped up his business because he directly criticizing the government.
I don't see how they can be kept separate. Governance is to a large degree the creation of policies for managing of resources, and managing resources is what economics is about.
Marxist theory says that the separation between economic and state power is illusory at best and intentionally deceptive at worst. So a communist isn't going to think it possible to separate economic and state power, whereas that concept of that separation of powers is a foundational component of modern liberalism. It's why the two camps have a such a hard time talking to each other; they really don't see things the same way.
Communism was a political and economic system. When stalin and hitler dipping their toes in faith/religion/belief it all went wrong and collapsed-in on itself.
Ancient Rome had government and politics before religion.
The last two thousand years had state religions at some points and the churches have their beliefs on governance, which they do internally and influence the world externally to some degree.
They are separate concepts and communism never reached the level of an effective religion. It's not easy to wash away the distinction between concepts.
Not nearly enough of them especially in the tech sector. Look at all of the damage google did when buying youtube and facebook buying instagram. Competition and innovation are supposed to be good things.
The US ensures its continuation and longevity via the small group of Elite families and new wealth that is continuously being generated. They control the media and so many more, which keeps populism at bay. If democratic forces were left on their own, it would have reached the state of decline that happened to many e.g. social democratic states.
China guards the power so that it stays with the Party, and imprisons Wealth when it becomes threatening
Your premise doesn't even hold for the short time period of 40 years. Who are the elite families that controlled the US in the early 80s and still control it now?
Because it is not breakup, in the same way that the establishment of Alphabet Group was not a breakup.
But as it has always been on the U.S.-dominated English-speaking Internet and media, facts and objectiveness do not matter when it comes to any topic related to China. Anyone can twist, spin, or literally invent anything to fit their own narrative about China and people will believe it without question as long as it leans on the antagonizing side.
The strict law about what can and cannot Chinese say, share, and see online doesn't help this.
Yes there are tons of nonsense online about China. But it is not helped by the total dragnet there is over there. And by the fact that some of the over-the-top stuff about China is indeed true.
I mean Jack Ma really _was_ disappeared right after the speech.
Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai also step off the stage after finishing speeches. Does that mean they have been "disappeared"? They have a private life in case you aren't aware. Acknowledging the fact that the CCP is meddling with private sector businesses is not an excuse to spout misinfo.
Tim Cook stepped off Trump’s board of CEOs and did not disappear. Jack Dorsey banned Trump from Twitter and didn’t disappear. Elon Musk constantly goes after Biden for no reason. He has not disappeared.
jack ma disappeared from the entire world - not a single photo could be found by people legitimately asking where he was. not even a publicist "he's holidaying in this country at the moment" could be had.
if he was a reticent person maybe it could be excused but he's been a jet setter for a decade now with tons of social appearances.
Arguably it is natural that belief in chance ("luck") and a supreme being would be at odds (npi). Odd number do seem to have a greater claim to authenticity than even numbers. Even directly implies division and multiplicity, whereas odd numbers are the children of unity, thus the 'world' and its chance events fall under the even numbers, but the reality is all about 1 and its odd children.
Great move. This will increase local competition and wages, diversify ideas and design, and make shareholders more money than as a single entity. As with Standard Oil and AT&T. The U.S. should continue investigating splitting up Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
It doesn't make sense to split Apple into hardware and software since the integration and simplicity that comes from it is the very thing that makes Apple unique.
Unfortunately this is also the source of all their monopolistic behavior.
Apple hardware should be incentivized to make great hardware for any operating system.
Apple software should be incentivized to sell to many manufacturers and also to not obey apple hardware's demands for locks to prevent things like the replacement of batteries.
Their union could be a great thing, but apple decided to use it to be a bunch of monopolists, so your break them up like all the others.
Great hardware for any OS sounds good in theory but not gonna happen in practice. When 10 hardware providers are supplying hardware for an OS, the hardware becomes a commodity, and the focus tends to go to cheapest for a given spec. You can see the same phenomenon in Windows and android hardware. If you supply a premium hardware for a premium price in a commodity market, you will just not have any market share.
People buy apple hardware for the integrated experience. e.g. I am not gonna buy a Dell running macOS or a Mac running Windows11.
Then why don’t people buy those over apple products? If you change Apple into that, I would be sad because now you’ve taken away a choice I had before.
tbf none of those have maintained quality for as long as apple have.
since iphone 1 apple has maintained a superlative quality of phone - nothing on android side comes anywhere close for the same amount of time.
i prefer just being able to say "buy an iphone/macbook" whenever i think what has quality rather than having to research options for 3 hours on what's the current state of the art in tech.
> rather than having to research options for 3 hours
Right. Just buy a Macbook...
Except, don't get the 12". That one was an overheating flop, should have never made it to market (nor the i9 16" Pro). Also, avoid the 2016-2019 ones with the butterfly keyboard. While you're at it, don't get the 13" Pro either, since it's a bit of a scam for the touchbar that wasn't that big of a hit. For all of these machines you'll want to upgrade them from the base memory to 16gb to make them last longer, and if you don't upgrade the storage then there's a good chance you'll only get single module speeds, which is significantly limited.
it's an interesting question (whether Apple's monopolistic behavior has produced any good), but entirely orthogonal to the underlying question, whether Apple is behaving monopolistically (they are).
yes, they are engaging in monopolistic behavior, which as mentioned above, does not require them to pass any particular threshold for being a monopoly
society has decided that some behaviors are in and of themselves bad, whether or not said threshold of yours is surpassed (for example monopolistic behaviors)
I just want to avoid going back to the time before Apple products were nice and relatively affordable, I hated buying a crappy Windows PC every other year and never being satisfied with it. Apple has transformed the entire industry twice in my lifetime, and I get really nervous when people say they should be forced to be just like another PC maker, and I should be forced to live again under a market that I absolutely loathed.
Look, Apple Silicon is neat, but you've lost the script if you want to claim it "changed the entire industry". The iPhone is an example of an industry-changer - actual industries changed here. Apple Silicon hasn't really changed the PC market - ARM is still a sideshow ISA for the Windows and Linux desktop alike. The market share hasn't changed dramatically. The line between people who want PCs and who want Macs is roughly the same as it was a decade ago.
> I get really nervous when people say [...] I should be forced to live again under a market that I absolutely loathed.
Well, that's the problem with walled gardens. If your platform exploits a tragedy of the commons to make money, society will probably eventually realize they're being scammed and demand fairer systems. A money-ocracy is not a solution to these problems, it's a clever guise to drain your wallet and make you think that life is improving because you spend money and buy products.
> Look, Apple Silicon is neat, but you've lost the script if you want to claim it "changed the entire industry".
Huh? I'm only referring to the Apple 2 (when Apple first changed the personal computing industry) and the 00s, when macs finally became fast and stable enough to be considered a decent value (one can argue it was the original iMac, but OS/X and then the first intel macbooks is when Macs really started making sense value wise). Apple silicon, a recent innovation, hasn't really changed the personal computing industry much.
> If your platform exploits a tragedy of the commons to make money, society will probably eventually realize they're being scammed and demand fairer systems
I don't think Apple is doing this. They are selling a decent product, which for some inexplicable reason other hardware/software producers can't seem to replicate. They seem to have a monopoly on "not sucking" but that's about it.
it's an interesting topic (whether Apple's monopolistic behavior has produced any good), but again, entirely orthogonal to the underlying question, whether Apple is behaving monopolistically (they are).
in the amount equal to how much you like any such benefits, other people dislike the downsides of monopolistic behavior, so we decided that it's bad even if maybe some good comes with the bad
I just disagree that Apple is behaving monopolistically. Dictionary definition of monopolistic behavior:
> having or trying to have complete control of something, especially an area of business, so that others have no share: She did not consider the fine a sufficient deterrent against monopolistic practices by big producers. The company is accused of monopolistic behavior.
Apple has completely control over Apple products and services, but not of the entire market, since there are plenty of other choices available in every market category they operate in. People who say they dislike Apple for its monopolistic behavior tend to seem to dislike Apple in general, and would rather not anyone buy their products, rather than just making the personal choice to not buy their products (because they indeed have many other choices and so can avoid buying Apple products and services).
your post does a good job of explaining how Apple's behavior is monopolistic, by that very definition, even despite not controlling the entire market: the "something" need not be the entire market
as for like vs dislike, the company isn't important enough for me to form such personal opinions about it, they're simply a company engaging in monopolistic behavior just like any other company engaging in monopolistic behavior
Again, the definition is clear. By the definition generalized in that way, any company building a proprietary system would be guilty of monopolistic behavior. If that's the case, then I guess it is a meaningless distinction anyways, and really not my worth much of my time to ponder either.
your own conclusions, whether about what other companies do or don't do (whataboutism) or anything else, are neither convincing nor here nor there, since the topic at hand is simply, is this one company in question (Apple) engaging in monopolistic behavior (they are)
the same goes for your personal opinions as to the meaning of such a conclusion -- while I'm sure you are a great person, and appreciate you respectfully commenting, such opinions are neither convincing nor relevant to the topic at hand: whether this one company in question (Apple) is engaging in monopolistic behavior (they are)
>Apple software should be incentivized to sell to many manufacturers and also to not obey apple hardware's demands for locks to prevent things like the replacement of batteries.
Is there any money in writing operating systems? I don't see a world where people suddenly start paying for Operating Systems
Apple licensed it's MacOS back in the mid-90s to third-party hardware manufacturers. If it was forced to by the government, I imagine it could do so again.
I actually really like that. Would force a (semi?-)public compatibility layer that allows other competitors to enter the space. If you want to back your iPhone up to Google Drive, you do you.
App Store would also likely end up in Services, which would also open up multi-app store compatibility. It's almost too good of a solution.
All except search are paid services so you wouldn't think so.
And search would probably make more money if they could sell ad space to other companies. And by selling information on popular search terms for particular links.
This just feels like completely arbitrary divisions based on what sounds good as opposed to any guiding logic around defining a monopoly and breaking it down along systemic lines. Populism, basically.
This is our problem as techies, we throw out this stuff with very little idea of the legal framework in place around antitrust. Even smaller ideas around precedent and the legal reasoning behind those precedents. I know everyone doesn't want to go to law school, but we have to at least understand that we can't go into a court and make stuff up.
Who can reasonably be broken up? On what reasonable basis?
Well,
Perhaps Meta?
Maybe Microsoft?
Alphabet definitely.
Apple? They'll laugh us out of court.
If we want these changes, we're going to have to advocate for changes in the fundamental ideas behind antitrust itself. Technology has outstripped the current regulatory environment's ability to keep it in order. And we don't seem to want to admit that. We just keep crying that the law won't act. Well, that's because no laws are being broken. And the politicians and the tech bigs are desperate to ensure that no one figures that out. They'll keep feeding us crumbs so that we don't do the dangerous thing and ask for changes in law.
Apple Hardware, Apple Licensed OSes, Apple Online Services, Apple Financial Services (apple card & apple pay & co), Apple News Services, Apple Mapping Services.
Think of everything that Apple (Meta, Google) do, think on which components would benefit from having startups replace and distrupt them and then break them up on those seams while forcing them to allow competition between their fragments (e.g. iPhone with Android OS, iOS on Microsoft phone platform, MacBook M1 with ARM Windows, iOS iPhone with Google Pay, etc. etc.).
I don't have to: I'm not a judge specialized in antitrust law and I don't have access to Apple's books to determine what would be more appropriate.
But a judge can, and will (if asked to), because - as I said - it's hardly an unprecedented situation. Just to mention one, AT&T still exists as a brand but was once broken up.
There will probably be trademark usage agreements, like with companies who split themselves like Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility (owned by Lenovo) both license the Motorola trademark from Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC unclear who owns the holding company.
Did they actually charge though? I remember hearing about that but it's been my sole method of messaging for years and I never remember setting up payments with them
IIRC it was 99 cents per year, and you could just keep "skipping" the payment. I don't think they ever cut anyone off from using it for not paying. A little bit like shareware (or nagware?).
I disagree, and think it would be harmful. I think we’d be better off splitting up the US government into smaller pieces but everyone loses their mind when I suggest it.
The US government is already split. You want country ran by companies? As much as I do not like politicians I think companies running the country would do much worse.
Agreed, and local power tends to be much more responsive and accountable than the Feds. It's one of the best parts of the system (the Senate is the worst imo)
The way to do that in a manner that doesn't simply empower multinational corporations, is to uncap the House of Representatives by repealing the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
Some believe that breaking up these companies would promote healthy competition, while others argue it could harm innovation and limit consumer choice. It is up to policymakers and regulators to carefully consider the potential benefits and drawbacks before making any decisions.
> The company’s artificial-intelligence and cloud-computing operations will form a separate unit, led by Daniel Zhang, the current group chief executive.
So it looks like Jack Ma's joke about AI meaning "Alibaba Intelligence" is coming to fruition.
I always appreciate the CCP’s twisted sense of symbolism. They chose 6 pieces to symbolize Jack Ma having his arms, legs and head cut off, and this is what remains. Chilling.
The CCP is not fighting monopolies, it is fighting companies that it doesn't like. Taobao/Tmall will still be a monopoly on online retail and will be a full part of Alibaba without taking external investment.
Does any western government activity promote monopolies abroad and threaten consequences if such monopolies are fought against, all while accepting state-backed monopoly at home?
Once you build a 5G system with Huawei, it's very hard and sometimes impossible to include other equipment. Huawei for this reason builds a "full-stack" 5G product that doesn't allow for anyone else's hardware but theirs.
And again, Ericsson and Nokia don't have nation states threatening countries if they don't use them in all their networks.
