alt Hacker NewsSurprised not more people are tying this to the Uber-Didi situation. IIRC it was a big complicated mess, but e.g. (this)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_Law_of_the_Peopl...] seems to imply that e.g. Uber would have to use Chinese domestic servers subject to auditing, etc. Upshot is eventually Uber stopped dumping billions to try to get a foothold, and eventually divested their Chinese operations.
(Also later Didi got kinda screwed imo right after their IPO in IMO a retaliatory move by the Chinese gov). So, is this TikTok ban one more shot in a new form of economic warfare? Is this type of war even new? Again, IMO, I think in instituting this law, this kind of stuff was on at least some of congress' minds.
Didi/Uber was more complicated than just data stuff.
At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.
Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".