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TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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It's an interesting subject. If not for Beijing's heavy hand, could Chinese internet companies have flourished much more and become international tech giants? Maybe, but there is one obvious counterpoint: where are the European tech giants? In an open playing field, it looks like American tech giants are pretty good at buying out or simply crushing any nascent competitors. If the Chinese did not have their censorship or great firewall, maybe the situation would have been like Europe, where the government tries to impose some rules, but doesn't really have much traction, and everyone just ends up using Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
At the same time, China is a more united place than Europe which consists of various countries with their own economy and culture. And to be fair, some countries have had their fair share of tech giants, like Spotify, Klarna or Ericsson from Sweden for example.
Nokia (was massive) Siemens ASML SAP
Also Soundcloud, T-Mobile, yes Spotify ... A lot of open source projects are based in Europe: Gitlab, Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, a few Linux distributions, LibreOffice... I think at least the Free Software and libre culture world is pretty active, here.
Plus aside from consumer facing software, the tech sector also exports a lot of engineering. There is German wielded train tracks all around the world, car parts, Airbus (planes), tools, logistics software and robotics, companies like SAP do lots of behind the scenes stuff...
(And half the internet giants weren't even founded in arbitrary places in the USA, but more or less just in California (Google, Apple, eBay, PayPal) the other half is more spread over the country, like Microsoft: New Mexico, Amazon: Washington, Facebook: Massachusetts if I'm not mistaken.)
Speaking of Linux distros, openSUSE Tumbleweed is an awesome German one that's not well-known outside the EU. Maybe someone will discover it this way and give it a try.
Fedora can't hold a candle to Tumbleweed's approach and philosophy. ๐
I wish all bad things in the world upon SAP and it's creators...What a miserable shitshow it is to work with, I have not met a single person who actually thought it solved anything in a good or tolerable way.