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But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?"

There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?



Hyper-nationalism is a backlash to globalism due to the recently realized risks of opaque governments exploiting transparent governments.

The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.


"Transparent" vs "opaque" governments strikes me as a false dichotomy. There is certainly a spectrum of transparency and I grant that the United States is more transparent than China (at least from my perspective inside the former), but keep in mind that Snowden is still facing charges if he comes home and Manning just got free after her latest round of detainment. Considering the ways national interests interact is more useful than using transparency as your measuring stick for everyone.


Transparency International ranks the US as number 23 and China as number 80 in their list of transparency/corruption. They are not in the same quartile and can't be considered similar in transparency.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2019/results/table


Don't overgeneralize: The page you linked explicitly lays it out. Corruption Perceptions Index. Each word is important. In addition, think tanks have biases and TI is no exception. Do you think that the "experts and business people" they interview to calculate CPI have interests which may align more or less with different nations?

In any case, I opened by admitting my perception of the United States is as a more transparent actor than China. Still doesn't make a dichotomy.


Was it really bad for US until China started working on 5G and trying to become independent in semiconductor sector? Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US.


>>>Was it really bad for US until China started working on 5G and trying to become independent in semiconductor sector?

Yes, it's bad because "naval strategy is build strategy", and all of that industrial activity and technical know-how exported to China has facilitated the buildup of a massive, modern, increasingly-blue-water Navy and supporting Air Force that is postured specifically to challenge the US. The US Navy's global presence and open sealane patrolling is key to enforcement of the Petrodollar system, and therefore one of the lynchpins of American economic hegemony. Eventually China will challenge the US, and the US will either back down or lose. Either way, expect the global order to change, the Petrodollar to go away, and the US economy to collapse....and we'll have basically spent 30+ years making down-payments on our own destruction.

At least that's the theory.


A US economic collapse would be real hard on China, given how much of our national debt is owed to Chinese creditors.


Not necessarily. China doesn't really have many options, when it comes to parking USD. If USD collapses, 0 chance of that happening any time soon, then CNY would probably take over the spot... That would balance out Chinese losses.


People have been going on about China in the US since their ascension to the WTO. Plenty of federal politicians have been elected on platforms for pushing hawkwish trade policy with China.

Obama and Romney both ran with the policy of designating China a currency manipulator in 2008: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/currency-manip...


Which is fascinating because the TPP that got bi-partisaned slamming in 2016 was an anti-China trade agreement for the APAC region.

When the TPP fell through, China moved in with it's own version lock down the region called RCEP.


I think that's a bit of a selective history though. In the 1990s there were plenty of politicians that fervently supported it, though the reasons they supported probably had something to do with this[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fi...


The parent comment implied that the US has done a very sudden turnaround of belief; that's a selective reading of history.

The US has always had undertones of economic nationalism, particularly around jobs getting outsourced to China. It just took a while for the pot to boil over.


The complete destruction of domestic labor markets could be considered a "negative"


> Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US.

It still is.


It's profitable for certain strata of economic classes and is destructive for most of the rest. But "in the aggregate the pie gets bigger", so Macroecon 101 is conserved. Yay.


You're being downvoted for being right. People without stock market share or who work as FTE for the hyper-successful tech companies are the only ones befitting under the guise of "lifting up underprivileged people around the world". It's disingenuous at best, nefarious at worst.


Wikipedia is the way to go.

Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it???

Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.


Comments like these have limited meaning in the context of a conversation about Google and YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be Gmail. Wikipedia does not aspire to be a general-purpose search engine.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).


I think they're saying that wikipedia is an example of media not designed to be profitable. Maybe there couldn't be a similar youtube, but there could be other platforms, like wikipedia, that aren't built for profit but to inform.


Wikipedia is very easy to game unfortunately.


I don't consider Wikipedia a valid reference for anything more trivial than sports statistics or Hollywood trivia these days.

I'd imagine the amount of blatant organized 'revisioning' by nation states, NGOs, for-profit corporations, and politically biased individuals is now dwarfing the objective individual contributors who once were the majority of Wikipedia's editors.


> Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it???

It’s not profitable.

Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta.

Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.


> Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.

No question. It's the primary reason its community stuck with it across the many years it took to build it up, whereas the editor communities abandon for-profit content farms like Quora or Answers.com.

> and there’s no money in generic ads

Wikipedia could operate the encyclopedia side of itself with generic advertising. There is a lot of money in generic ads, relatively speaking, when you're dishing out static text content and some images at a billion page views per day (especially when the bulk of your platform's expansion is over, so your situation re expenses is increasingly stable).

Could you run the encyclopedia thin for ~$20 million per year? Based on their budget history, you absolutely could. So could you bring in at least $20m in revenue via generic advertising, against several hundred million page views that you're able to show ads on (a bit larger than the English edition's daily page views; ie I'm heavily discounting monetizable traffic down from their global figures to tilt this even more conservatively)?

You need a CPM of around a range of $0.10 to $0.15 to at least have a shot at making it work. It's a very low number for a super premium property that sits at the top of nearly every Google search result.

You could make ten phone calls and trivially fill $20m in generic advertising every year. Pick up the phone and call: Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, Comcast, Unilever, Samsung, AT&T. At $2m each, you'd have to fight them off with a stick at those CPM rates for that reach. Procter & Gamble spends $10 billion globally on advertising, they wouldn't take $2m to slap their brands on Wikipedia? They'd probably take that every month if they could.

Would any and all manner of advertising turn off visitors and editors? Probably. That's the far bigger problem than whether Wikipedia could bring in $20m per year in advertising on their massive traffic base. Not to mention that Google might (would) start viewing them as a competitor and might (would) downgrade their content placement to neuter that risk.


What if the laws against censoring content would be quite strict, then a censoring Chinese YouTube clone wouldn't even be possible.

(In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).


I don’t consider that likely. There are many Chinese social media properties inside the Great Firewall but they haven’t ever had much success outside of it.

Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.


tiktok.


> Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all?

You know YouTube is already banned in China, right?




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