U.S. Anti-China Tech Protectionism Is Sloppy, Corrupt, And Stupid

From 2019 to 2026 you might recall that U.S. policymakers were utterly obsessed with "Chinese influence" over TikTok. For those seven years you couldn't spend a day without seeing a lawmaker or pundit hyperventilating over the claim that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, was controlled by the Chinese government, opening the door to privacy, foreign propaganda, and national security concerns (you were to ignore evidence was weak, and much of the hysteria was cultivated by a direct competitor).How did Americans "solve" the problem? A bipartisan collection of lawmakers forced ByteDance to sell majority ownership of TikTok to a bunch of Donald Trump's billionaire friends, including Larry Ellison – the anti-democratic right wing billionaire trying to dominate what's left of U.S. media. It was not a net improvement. The new owners of TikTok are every bit as unscrupulous as the previous owners (potentially more so), and the privacy and propaganda threats to U.S. consumers are every bit as…