> Is there a fairly applied rule here, or is sinophobia driving this?
Don't hide behind sinophobia to defend China's communism. This has nothing to do with ethnicity.
China is using its laws to effectively ban competition from foreign companies which don't want to cooperate with its totalitarian form of government. The US should do the same and not allow competition from totalitarian countries.
restricting the free flow of information between citizens of countries whose corrupt leaders are engaged in a dick measuring contest only benefits the corrupt leaders.
advocating that we need to impose blinders on ourselves as well to punish them is just short sighted self-punishment
How so? Western platfroms bailed PRC after they were unwilling to handle PRC legal requirements that every PRC company has to deal with. Reasonable requirements like media filtering that western companies were eventually forced to adopt a few years later because it's obvious PRC was precient that attention driven platforms caused violence/destability if left unchecked.
Ergo both FB and Google had internal initiatives to re-enter PRC market after domestic pressures to improve moderation capabilities enabled them to comply with PRC laws. Until internal FB/Google drama killed the effort. It has very little to do with "totalitarianism" because FAANG + co. was eager to compete in PRC market, until they realized they couldn't, or their employees wouldn't let them. Meanwhile Bytedance/TikTok keeps operating in US because they don't mind working around bullshit like Trump's EO. At the end of the day, it's US corporate incompentence and broader political culture that thinks US companies should operate in other markets with impunity that flunked them out of PRC market while dealing with regulatory push back else where.
If US wants to pull national security card to keep down PRC platforms, they have a right to. But don't pretend it's about competition. Bytedance/TikTok flourished in the west for the same reason FB/Google/Twitter failed in PRC - Chinese platforms know how to put up with regulatory/political bullshit and become more competitive because of it. Like TikTok isn't huge in US because domestic US laws is keeping FB down. It's huge because the kind of content that survives Chinese censorship designed to mitigiate political divisness is the kind of opiate that most people would rather consume.
Don't hide behind sinophobia to defend China's communism. This has nothing to do with ethnicity.
China is using its laws to effectively ban competition from foreign companies which don't want to cooperate with its totalitarian form of government. The US should do the same and not allow competition from totalitarian countries.