TikTok pets it, is that why they want to ban it?

Brendan Carr, president of the United States communications regulator, sent a letter to the CEOs of Google and Apple last June asking them to remove TikTok from the catalogs of their mobile app stores.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
26 September 2022 Monday 00:57
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TikTok pets it, is that why they want to ban it?

Brendan Carr, president of the United States communications regulator, sent a letter to the CEOs of Google and Apple last June asking them to remove TikTok from the catalogs of their mobile app stores. The reason? In Carr's words, because the social network "works like a sophisticated surveillance tool that collects large amounts of personal and sensitive data."

When I read this news I thought it was a joke, because I was telling Google and Apple. I say this because it sounds ironic that this request is made to the heads of the companies that control exactly what we do, where we do it, when, with whom, how much we spend and what we buy, even when we go to sleep and when we we wake up.

What is the problem with this question? If an American company has all our data, that's fine, but if it's Chinese, that's wrong? The United States thinks that it is the arbiter of the digital world (and of many other worlds), but perhaps we should all start playing by the same rules. Privacy yes, but for everyone.

In addition, this is happening in a completely different scenario than 20 years ago, when this country was the king of mambo on the internet. Now, however, the country of Benjamin Franklin is losing more and more ground to companies from other parts of the world, including, especially China.

This American primacy on the Internet has been gradually diluted. A good proof of this, as I explained a few months ago, is that unicorns escape from the United States. I'm not talking about the mythological creature, but about the start-ups that reach a value of one billion dollars. In fact, the largest unicorn today is not American, but from China, and it is precisely ByteDance, the technological group to which TikTok belongs, whose value reaches 140 billion dollars. And the podium is completed by Elon Musk and his Space X, and Shein, another Chinese giant.

Everything indicates that the request that Brendan Carr made to Apple and Google is not due to a matter of national security, as he said, but to try to stop the unstoppable rise of technology companies located in China.

More ideas in the next Don't See It.