You can’t play on both sides of the Great Firewall

You can’t play on both sides of the Great Firewallrestofworld.org
You can't play on both sides of the Great Firewall
by rvolz.eth1470 🥝 • 3y
AI summary of the linked article

The U.S. is close to banning TikTok, with the House having passed a bill and the Senate vote still pending, and the author argues that the logic behind a ban reflects a drift toward digital mercantilism, with private companies used as resources in great-power conflicts. Lawmakers' core concern is that ByteDance runs social networks in both China and the U.S., and there is no guarantee that Chinese censorship and legal access procedures for Douyin won't spill over onto TikTok. The article notes that Google's abandoned Chinese search project, revealed by a whistleblower in 2018, suggests it is difficult for online services to operate on both sides of the Great Firewall.

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TikTok is web2, would social media popular with web3 be so different, eg drakula.app?
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I might be missing something, but I don't think there's anything decentralized about the Drakula app. Their value prop is that you can earn money via tokens, and that is enabled by the EVM.
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I guess if you operate a client, you'd have to follow the country's laws.

So, if TikTok was a decentralized protocol and the most popular US client was ran by a Chinese company, I think they'd face the same problems. And the Apple-Google duopoly could probably ban all the alternative Chinese clients.


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