The end of the American-dominated Internet
Benedict Evans just wrote up a longer post about the slide from his Summer Update that I highlighted in my last link roundup:
He makes two great points about TikTok: 1) The U.S. should be thinking about it in the same way Europeans have thought about Facebook/Google/Apple for years; and 2) it’s just the first of what will surely be many dominant non-U.S. owned apps the wrestle with:
There are all sorts of issues with the ways that the US government has addressed Tiktok in 2020, but the most fundamental, I think, is that it has acted as though this is a one-off, rather than understanding that this is the new normal — there will be hundreds more of these. You can’t one-at-a-time this — you need a systematic, repeatable approach. You can’t ask to know the citizenship of the shareholders in every popular app — you need rules that apply to everyone.
