I have to ask this question if it is really possible to force one company to be sold in order to stay alive.
China also ban a lot of US companies like Google, FB, etc. but they created their own platforms.
- Baidu
This is what drives the innovation and economy.
I think US has every right to ban TikTok, but they can't force the company to be sold to US.
This is what kills every startup. Let's have a look at Snapchat.
- 2011 - Snapchat was launched as a Picaboo, iOS-only app.
- 2012 - first big investment by Lightspeed Ventures.
- 2013 - Snapchat valuation was $800 million.
- 2013 - Snapchat was offered $3 billion acquisition from Facebook. Snapchat declined Facebook offer.
- 2017 - Snap Inc. goes public with an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, selling 200 million priced at $17 per share, for a total of $3.4 billion.
They are still independent company and if they would accept FB offer it would end up like Parse, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Gowalla, Spool, and many other which you probably never heard of. Do you know why? Because these projects either got implemented in Facebook or just simply got shut down.
This is what creates monopol because people allow big tech companies to buy competition.
Same happend to beam.pro, it got acquired by Microsoft in 2017 and got shut down in 2020. If they would stay on their own they would still have a chance to make it. (maybe)
Snapchat rather wait 4 years but they got even higher valuation as initially offered and they are not under FB corporation.
It's hard to say what is right and what is wrong in this market when everybody is driven by the money. This is great opportunity for open-source software to thrive, support smaller developers and decentralized blockchain apps to create more customer friendly environment.
