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enitihas | 5 years ago

Unlike Huawei, TikTok doesn't have critical production dependency on the US (specialized semiconductors). Huawei also won't have been too impacted if just their imports were blocked in the US. TikTok will be hurt without US customers, but they are too big in China that they will easily survive. And will easily compete worldwide against any US company.

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nilkn|5 years ago

The reasons I'd seen for considering a US ban on TikTok were all security related (i.e., various claims to the effect of TikTok collecting data on US citizens for usage by the CCP). Those reasons, if valid, would seem to remain valid even in the face of your points here.

zjaffee|5 years ago

Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.

notmyfriend|5 years ago

They don't need anything more than a single Chinese national who they can blackmail to be able to get what they want. A quick meeting to the persons family to make sure they get the message its all it needs.

The CCP has leverage on any Chinese national who still has family in China.

itake|5 years ago

And controlling the content narrative. E.g. pro-china content could be promoted directly to young Americans.

sudosysgen|5 years ago

Even Huawei functionally has an advanced enough node at SMIC (14nm-ish) to fulfill their core industry.

kyboren|5 years ago

For their handset SoCs, sure. But the real prize appears to be the base station market. As I understand it, Huawei's base stations are critically dependent upon Xilinx FPGAs. With those no longer available to them, Huawei is in a difficult position.

They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.).

I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.