Daily Authority: China’s tech crackdown 📉

Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft all reported huge revenues last night that somehow have grown by huge amounts, despite being huge companies already. It’s not normal, it’s unusual, it’s unlike anything in history, and there are links to coverage in the summary below.

On the other hand, China’s tech giants are under pressure. It’s not that there aren’t an antitrust lawsuit or two against US technology floating around, it’s that China’s influence over its businesses is absolute, but we don’t quite understand what is happening just yet.

The newest:

• WeChat, China’s completely ubiquitous local app, was forced to suspend registration of new users in China to comply with “relevant laws and regulations” (TechCrunch).
• Tencent, the owner of WeChat, and Baidu, were also fined by the antitrust authorities (Blumenberg, $).
• After Didi’s attempt to go public in the US, despite opposition from the Cyberspace Administration of China, this challenge of authority was not appreciated, one might say. Didi was forced to block the app from the app stores, and Bloomberg Reports suggest that guard dogs will impose massive, unprecedented sentences.
• That came after Alibaba’s Jack Ma more or less stuck his foot in, which resulted in Ant Financial’s IPO being postponed and a long time it wasn’t actually seen – and led to Forbes To write things like The sad end of Jack Ma Inc.
• The Trump administration launched its own attacks on TikTok and WeChat, but most of them fizzled out when President Joe Biden withdraw this action.

Why it matters:

• China’s tech industry has seen share prices plummet. Per FT ($): The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index, a benchmark for New York-listed Chinese tech stocks, is down 15 percent in two days.
• Why is China harming its own tech sector across the board? Why, when technology and innovation have given China an economic boom? Wouldn’t China support its own?
• The reasons are not easy to determine. Experienced tech reporter Kara Swisher writes: “The crackdown in China is a hot mess and it’s coming” Per The New York Times, remarked: “As with all things in the authoritarian country, the reason for this is shrouded in double talk about privacy, cybersecurity, and sensitive location information – especially rich given that they come from a place that has essentially turned into a surveillance economy.Swisher focuses on a conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about China.
• (Unlike some of his colleagues, Zuck has nothing to lose in China.)
• Another opinion of Noah Smith is that China is focused on stepping on its consumer-facing productsto get engineers and entrepreneurs to work not on innovative fun technology, but on innovative technologies such as chips, firmware, manufacturing, motors: “… China’s leading politicians are now trying to align the country’s industrial mix with what they think the nation as a whole. ”
• This is even more important for China when supplies from TSMC etc. dry up.
• But will China really drive its successful consumer tech winners further?

📆 Samsung has released a teaser trailer for its August 11th Unpacked event, with a look at the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and sheds light on the development of Motorola and BlackBerry phones and asks: “Are ‘good’ phones good enough?” (Android authority).

👉 Last minute Huawei P50 Pro leaking teases a beefy quad camera system. It starts tomorrow in China (Android authority).

📈 OnePlus the big, instant winner in the US after LG left the company (Android authority).

That Nothing Ear 1 are completely transparent earphones which allow form to follow function. After all the lengthy drips and drops and teasing and yesterday’s launch, the good news is that the specs are okay for $ 99. Reviews are coming! (Android authority).

📸 Instagrams new settings target creepy adultsto meet some kind of bare minimum for Facebook to evade regulation (Gizmodo).

📉 The time has come get harder Buying a pre-built gaming PC in some US states, interestingly because of the newly introduced energy regulations in these states. Which, I mean, sure, that could be good in theory, but weird display limits and a maximum total power consumption of 75kWh / year could just mean people are building their own PCs again to beat the rules. What a classic regulatory problem is: making rules easy, effects harder to think through (Gizmodo).

💻 There is a new modular laptop and it seems good: “Framework’s lightweight modular laptop is a winner” (Ars-Technica).

📈 Big big income is enough for me to ditch the Big Tech name and go to Giant Tech. Seek: Apple iPhone sales up 50% 50% despite lack of chips Achieve a record profit of $ 21.7 billion, twice as much as last year – and all without a new iPhone coming onto the market (CNET). In the meantime, Microsoft’s profits shot up 47 percent in the fourth quarter with cloud up 30%, even though Surface business is down 20% (TechCrunch), while Alphabet has erased expectations as Google Cloud reduces losses, grows 54%. YouTube’s reported $ 7 billion in revenue is up 84% year over year, which seems like a lot for an established platform (TechCrunch).

🎶 US government sells Martin Shkreli’s unique Wu-Tang Clan album, but to whom? (Engage).

🥽 “Virtual reality is the rich white child of technology” (Wired).

🔫 Halo Infinite‘s first multiplayer beta starts on July 29th (The edge).

🧠 Lucasfilm is hiring YouTubers who used deepfakes to improve The Mandalorian (Engage).

🐟 “ELI5: Why does seafood go bad faster than meat?? “(r / explainlikeimfive).

Flat Earth, Flat Earther, hahaha. Right? We all understand, but there are still those who want to fall back on things that were already established by the ancients: Carl Sagan explains here how Eratosthenes, a legendary Greek thinker found out about 2,200 years ago that the earth was round.

Anyway, back to the old flat earth. Here is a beautifully done piece by space and science communicator Daisy Dobrijevic about Eight Ways Life Would Get Weird on a Flat Earth (LiveScience).

• Strange could be generous. The almost absolute guarantee of death is more likely!

For example:

• No gravity, or maybe just gravity at the center of flatness.
• No atmosphere.
• And no more northern lights and we’d all be roasted.
• Only for this: “… the lack of auroras would be the least of our worries as the earth would no longer be protected from solar winds. The earth and everything on its surface would be bombarded with harmful solar radiation, leaving behind a barren world that resembles our neighbor Mars, according to NASA.”
• Good times for Martians, less so for us.

Applause,

Tristan Rayner, Managing Editor