http://blogs.forbes.com/gordonchang/...-buy-facebook/
The Chinese may be able to buy up massive portions of our debt, but they can't afford to buy the internet.
And as we have seen with MySpace, one great thing about a free-market capitalistic system, especially on the internet, is that the people can drop it en masse almost overnight for greener pastures.
Unfortunately though, it seems there are less and less true players that buy up new successful enterprises to give them the cash infusion they need to really market themselves and become huge. People think AOL for example is just that old company that had a monopoly on dialup modem access for a while... nope, several hundred of the major blogs on the internet are owned by AOL (including seemingly competing sites) from Engadget, to Joystick, to Autoblog, to TechCrunch, you name it. So in actuality, its like trying to decide which fast food place to eat at not realizing that Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Wingstreet, Long John Silver's, A&W, etc is all the same company with different menus, itself a spinoff of its parent company Pepsi. So the illusion of hundreds of choices, is really just a Pepsi vs CocaCola choice when it really comes down to it.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Gordon Chang @ Forbes News
*snip*
The Communist Party, despite three decades of economic reform, insists on its monopoly of political power. And to maintain that monopoly, it tightly controls its own instrumentalities. That’s especially true at this moment because the Party is in the midst of the most comprehensive crackdown on society since the 1989 Beijing Spring. Chinese leaders clearly view social media as a threat to their rule, especially after seeing its force-multiplying effect in the ongoing Arab Spring protests that have toppled governments. In short, China’s sovereign wealth fund, which is no more independent of the Communist Party than the Beijing municipal government, wants to buy a stake in the world’s most prominent social networking site because Chinese leaders want to control social media. And they hope to do that as part of their comprehensive campaign to dominate the conversation about China—not just inside the country but around the world as well. *snip* |
And as we have seen with MySpace, one great thing about a free-market capitalistic system, especially on the internet, is that the people can drop it en masse almost overnight for greener pastures.
Unfortunately though, it seems there are less and less true players that buy up new successful enterprises to give them the cash infusion they need to really market themselves and become huge. People think AOL for example is just that old company that had a monopoly on dialup modem access for a while... nope, several hundred of the major blogs on the internet are owned by AOL (including seemingly competing sites) from Engadget, to Joystick, to Autoblog, to TechCrunch, you name it. So in actuality, its like trying to decide which fast food place to eat at not realizing that Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Wingstreet, Long John Silver's, A&W, etc is all the same company with different menus, itself a spinoff of its parent company Pepsi. So the illusion of hundreds of choices, is really just a Pepsi vs CocaCola choice when it really comes down to it.
