Who will get TikTok, the future fintech of Yandex and Wheely against the Moscow mayor's office.

[root]

Who will get TikTok, the future fintech of Yandex and Wheely against the Moscow City Hall



What's happening

In the early days of August, Donald Trump managed to rethink several times what the United States would do with the Chinese video service TikTok. First he stated that will block the Chinese social network "soon, immediately" - a decree on this he was preparing to sign last Saturday. Then events flashed like a kaleidoscope: first, the American business TikTok decided to buy Microsoft, but Trump did not approve of this deal, then changed his mind, but stated that the participants in the transaction will have to share with the state and send to the Treasury "a significant amount of money" for mediation.
Thursday Trump signed two decrees that prohibited American companies from any transactions with the TikTok owner of the Chinese ByteDance, if the video service is not sold before September 15, and in fact banned in the USA, another Chinese service is Wechat. “To protect our nation, I have taken steps to address the threat posed by a single TikTok mobile app. Further action is needed to address a similar threat posed by another WeChat mobile application, ”Trump said in the decree. The decree will enter into force in 45 days.
In addition to Microsoft, which does not hide its interests, TikTok is rumored to be interested in Apple and Twitter ... But Microsoft has moved further than competitors - according to the FT, it is discussing the purchase not only of TikTok's business in the US and Canada, but in general everywhere, including Europe and India, where the service is already blocked.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, whose opinion on blocking TikTok was not particularly asked, initially tried to fix the situation. After Trump's claims, he said he did not mind selling TikTok if it would be better for the company's future, and promised create 10 thousand jobs in the United States. Trump was not impressed. A few days later, in a letter to his employees, Imin wrote that the United States is not seeking to sell TikTok, but wants to destroy the company and block the service.
Now TikTok threatens to the American authorities in court: "We will use all legal remedies available to us to guarantee the rule of law and its non-violation, as well as that our company and its users are treated fairly - if not in the administration, then in the US courts," the statement said. TikTok.

Red threat

For the first time, questions about TikTok from the American authorities arose back in 2019. Back in February of that year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined ByteDance for $ 5.7 million for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The case concerned the Musical.ly app, which TikTok joined in 2018. TikTok was accused not of data leaks, but of the fact that the social network collected data about children without parental consent, and demanded that all videos with children under 13 be removed.
This year, TikTok began to experience problems in India: in June, the social network blocked along with 58 more Chinese apps. The formal reason is a threat to India's sovereignty and state security. Real - aggravation between Indian and Chinese military in disputed territory in the Himalayas. Blocking TikTok in July pondered in Australia: Authorities launched an investigation into the service, but so far have not found evidence that its work threatens national security, and user data is at risk.
The problem with all the accusations against TikTok is that even if the Chinese authorities have access to social media data, no evidence of this has yet been presented. Peking this on hand: there called actions of Americans intimidation and violation of the principles of a market economy. TikTok itself approves , which stores American user data on servers in the United States and backups in Singapore.
But this week, Trump signed two decrees to counter threats. The first - about TikTok: Chinese applications continue to threaten national security and in order to solve the problem, it is necessary to take measures against the social network, it says. “TikTok automatically collects vast amounts of information about users ... including location, browsing and search history. This threatens that the Chinese Communist Party will have access to the personal and confidential information of Americans, ”the decree says. When the decree comes into effect, Americans will be prohibited from conducting any transactions with ByteDance.
Second the decree is about WeChat. It says that WeChat, which almost no one uses in the US, also poses a threat to national security. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party allegedly uses the messenger to spy on Chinese people abroad. "For example, in March 2019, a researcher discovered a Chinese database containing billions of WeChat messages sent by users not only from China, but also from the United States, Taiwan, South Korea and Australia." The decree prohibits transactions with WeChat in the American jurisdiction - despite the fact that the service is not even a separate company. The rest of the assets of the owner of WeChat - the giant Tencent - are not affected by this limitation.
Both decrees enter into force 45 days after signing. Why the US authorities allow two applications that threaten US national security to function and collect data on Americans for another month and a half is not specified in the decrees.

Clean network plan

How exactly the blocking of Chinese services will be arranged is also not clear yet. In the United States, there have not yet been precedents when in some service the ability to transfer data between users and servers was completely blocked, as it works in China, writes The Verge. The US may require the removal of the social media app from app stores - but TikTok is already installed on 100 million Americans, so this will not solve the problem.
There will be a presidential election in the United States in three months, and the Internet Cleanup is part of Trump's political agenda, which this week presented Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. With the help of the "Clear network" plan, the American authorities intend to clean out Chinese services from the American Internet.
The plan is aggressive, but speculative, and consists of five points:

• Removing Chinese applications from American appstores;
• Banning Chinese device manufacturers from pre-installing Chinese apps;
• Prohibition of storing American data on Chinese servers;
• Banning roaming of Chinese operators on American networks;
• Banning the use of transatlantic internet cables to prevent the Chinese from spying.

How exactly this plan should work and who will implement it is unclear. Experts, interviewed The Verge believe that so far this is only a concussion of air. Among other things, there are simply no laws in the United States to help implement the plan. Maria Farrell, a researcher of global regulation in the IT industry, compares this approach to the Russian one - the government quickly approved the law on "sovereign runet", but it does not have the resources to enforce it.

A dangerous precedent

It is possible to understand the position of the American authorities in the history of TikTok, some IT entrepreneurs believe. After all, China has banned almost all non-Chinese social apps on its territory. reminded Telegram founder Pavel Durov: "Why would the rest of the world, including the US, give their markets to a Chinese application?" But this creates "a dangerous precedent that could kill the Internet as a truly global network - or what's left of it," Durov added.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg meeting with employees stated that TikTok's case is "a bad use case in the long run." And while the American authorities may have reason to be concerned, the ban on TikTok means that another country could easily ban some of Facebook's services in the future.
Trump's ban on Chinese services shows what an internet trade war would look like, writes Bloomberg: “Two years of trade disputes between the US and China have resulted in higher prices for consumer electronics, industrial equipment, soybeans, steel and washing machines. Now we'll see what an eye for an eye looks like when it comes to the Internet. " And this is a new thing for the world: if China has been building its firewall for several decades, then in the United States there have been no precedents of blocking a service just on the grounds that it is foreign. The step Trump took can lay the foundation for future decisions. "The fate of TikTok is a reminder to future international giants from China that they must be prepared to retaliate in a new era of techno-nationalism." writes Bloomberg.
Banning WeChat - the world's most popular messenger - may harm Apple's international business and exacerbate the US-China conflict. WeChat is not only a messenger, but also a service for buying everything. In the worst case, American brands like Walmart or Starbucks will not be able to sell goods to Chinese customers - now all sales go through WeChat minis. For understanding: to China has to about 9% of Walmart's international sales, and it is the fastest growing market for it.
Trump's demand to share TikTok proceeds with the government is another dangerous precedent. First, the government forces a foreign company to sell the business, guided by national security issues, and then receives compensation for this, simultaneously acting as a regulator and as a recipient of benefits from the transaction.

Yandex prepares the ground for the future fintech ecosystem

Less than two months after the divorce from Sberbank, Yandex started thinking about its own fintech ecosystem. This is not surprising: in 2012, when the state bank bought a stake in Yandex.Money, the IT company signed an agreement on non-competition in financial services, but now it has been terminated. Yandex began to prepare for the divorce back in the spring: then the company filed applications for registration of 17 trade marks, including: "YaBank", "YaKredit", "YaVklad", "YaStrakhovka" and "YaSchet". VTB may become a partner bank in some of these services: during the last placement, the bank bought a minority stake in a company, and before that - a company were preparing to launch a joint investment service. What exactly Yandex is up to is not yet known, but it may well aim at its financial ecosystem like Apple Pay and Google Pay, experts say.

Wheely blocked for refusing to share data with authorities

Russia has its own dramatic story of the confrontation between the state and private service, albeit on a completely different scale than that of TikTok in the United States. Wheely elite taxi service fell out with the Moscow authorities and is now preparing to be blocked. Wheely founder Anton Chirkunov told that the mayor's office filed a lawsuit against the service due to the fact that he refused to disclose "confidential customer information." The mayor's office was required to provide data on the movements of drivers, with the help of which it is possible to track where and when each trip was started and ended, Chirkunov wrote. Such a requirement is not spelled out in the laws, he is sure. The court did not agree with him: on Friday the service was locked for 90 days for refusing to comply with the requirements of an official. This is not the first time the service has been in conflict with the Moscow authorities: in April, the mayor's office banned its work due to the fact that only white and yellow taxis were allowed in the city, and the black business class did not receive such a privilege. Then Chirkunov turned to Sergei Sobyanin: he bought an advertising page in Kommersant and there he asked to cancel the ban. On May 7, the authorities promised to lift the ban, but only if the service agrees to transfer the geolocation of cars to the Moscow Department of Transport. Wheely renewed work despite the demand, but within a day the Moscow Department of Transport applied to the prosecutor's office to check the service for violations of requirements.

The bell

Source

 

[Turdubaev Dastan]

ByteDance will sell Tik Tok sooner or later. Who will buy - God knows.

Or Tik Tok will be buried like Like

 

[root]

ByteDance will sell Tik Tok sooner or later. Who will buy - God knows.

Or Tik Tok will be buried like Like

This is unlikely

 

[Turdubaev Dastan]

This is unlikely

Such social networks will be 100% buried alive by young and more functional social networks. More precisely, not functional, but moronic and simple. So that even a child could come in and shoot a video. How many such zoomer social networks like Lile, Kwai, etc. were there, which quickly gained popularity and quickly lost them.


The new generation of buzzers will find other and dumber social media. What can I say: Degradation

 

[частный детектив. Узбекистан. Ташкент.]

Such social networks will be 100% buried alive by young and more functional social networks. More precisely, not functional, but moronic and simple. So that even a child could come in and shoot a video. How many such zoomer social networks like Lile, Kwai, etc. were there, which quickly gained popularity and quickly lost them.


The new generation of buzzers will find other and dumber social media. What can I say: Degradation

I agree 100% The children of the Zoomers themselves will be different)