(Photo credit @konkarampelas)
I was on vacation last week and ended up having an accidental but much appreciated digital detox. I went camping and surprisingly, there wasn’t very good cell service (and definitely no wifi). So I was forced to spend my days hiking with the dog, swimming, and reading good novels. I’m committing to myself to take one day a week for the rest of the summer to do the same thing - amazing how much more relaxed I am and how much easier it is to focus my attention. (Though apparently, I am still unsure of what day it is!) One of the things I didn’t miss was social media (mostly) as I continue to observe how much control I don’t have over what appears in my feeds. I ran across this report which highlights China Internet trends for 2020, and thought I’d expand on a few topics here.
#techtopic
China has been a market that many US-founded tech companies want to break into (hello, 1.4billion users) but have continued to fail over and over again. (Great infographic depicting many of these U-turns, along with a full list of blocked tech companies here.) In the absence of many of these tech companies we in the US hear about daily, China has a robust ecosystem of home-grown tech companies that have seen huge success. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are the big three -- but Bytedance has been in the news a lot recently as the company that developed the super popular social media app TikTok.
One huge difference between the US companies and the Chinese companies is their engagement with the government. While next week, the CEOs of 4 of the largest tech companies are testifying in front of Congress about antitrust regulations -- in general, they operate completely independently of government control. In China, there is arguably much more control exerted by their government on tech companies. The extent of that control concerns the US government (and more recently the UK), which has banned Huawei from providing 5G equipment due to fears of Chinese spying on the network. The US Senate moved one step closer to implementing a ban on having TikTok devices on government devices due to concerns of data sharing with the Chinese government. These bans have led to different company responses: the mega-list of actions Huawei has taken, while Bytedance is rumored to be considering a TikTok spinoff to ensure it keeps its US user base.
#video
I know it’s actually an ad for Apple - but it’s just so well-done that I had to share. Go Underdogs!
