TikTok’s bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.
The social media company had hoped a federal appeals court would agree with its argument that the law was unconstitutional because it represented a “staggering” impact on the free speech of its 170 million US users.
But the court upheld the law, which it said “was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents”.
[…]
The court agreed the law was “carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC (People’s Republic of China).”
But the free market is free, guys! Look at this freedom!
Truly free markets suck. The inevitably become dominated by a small number of monopolies, who fuck over everyone else as hard as possible every day …
There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.
In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.
It helps to think before you type.
The free market is free if and when you play by the same -democratic- rules. Look at Romania, just to name an actual example. Tiktok is much worse than Facebook and (most) others, and being worse is not an easy task here.
Tik Tok is not much worse than Facebook. The only reason is because Facebook cooperates with the US agencies, while they don’t get the information from Tik Tok. US does not like that citizen data is going to China instead being able to collect it themselves. From privacy standpoint of the end user, it does not matter who has the data; lost privacy is lost privacy.
I think Tiktok is much worse. It’s about a foreign country whose government is pursuing a dictatorial policy trying to interfere in foreign elections (again, look at Romania, for example).
The argument of FB collaborating with the US gov is true I guess, but isn’t valid here. China is doing the same, the Chinese government is banning the Western version of Tiktok, too, let alone all other non-Chinese apps. So the ‘free market’-argument doesn’t make any sense here, it’d be even hypocritical.
Except all the social media are doing the exact same thing. This is pointless political posturing
Not quite. TikTok has been shown to tweak their algorithm against criticism of China. That’s the real reason for the concern. Their ability and willingness to purposefully manipulate people.
Big corporations cannot survive in a real free market. For that very reason real free markets do not exist. So the ‘legitimate businesses’ which do not do things as well as others do can survive.
As horrible as it sounds, no regulation is what makes a free market. But there is no free market because when there is talk of free market, it just means extreme regulation to stifle small, extremely small business. These businesses run by people who work with their own hands are what give the large ones a run for their money. They’re the real obstacle to large entities which do things in not the best way (so almost all of them). What people are left with are legitimate small businesses allowed under regulation after everything has been restricted already… and with the methods these follow, they’re no harm to the big entities. The common human be damned, they’re forced to choose from the least bad option for anything.
‘Free market’ in politics is a joke, an intentional joke. It wouldn’t be a little bit surprising if the ones who advocate for free markets most have a laugh, outside of public view, at people who actually believe their points.
To be fair… real free market would see the crashing of many industries as things go back to being a bit more practical. A slow process which takes even luxury to be affordable—but the meaning of luxury changes. Things inessential for survival would then be deemed luxury and such things, good things which are also very accessible, would be fairly common around. The main flaw with that, however, is the purpose of luxury. Luxury is hardly used to refer to things merely inessential for survival, they’re considered mere vehicles of showing your status and power (even though a relatively simple trick would be to not pay no heed to them). They are objects to enable one’s pride, ‘pride comes before the fall’ be damned to them. One can have solace in the thought that the fall really does come, though.
Note: I do not support deregulation, it just means to allow big corporations to fuck around at the cost of other humans. But then, I do not really support anything.
“Free markets” is a complete farce. The only free markets are in places where no government exists like Somalia. In a true free market, anyone could take over a business by sheer force since no laws would be there to protect them.
That’s not what the term means. It is a historical term with a precise meaning, and that meaning is not synonymous with “unregulated”.
