alt Hacker News> Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."
It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.
The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China is because it’s bad to run a country like a business, full stop. When you do so, you kill far more people.
Replies
pbgcp2026 • today at 1:53 AM
"you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom" LOL - are you sure about this?
> It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.
It is not clear why this is bad for Alibaba or China, could you expand on that?
> it’s bad to run a country like a business
The "Chinese miracle" resulting from China's integration with the global economy has lifted ~800 million people out of poverty and raised standards of living quite rapidly overall. A lot has been written on the topic, but suffice to say that it's a fairly unorthodox argument to make that the Chinese have not been well-served by the arrangement.
> level of freedom
The context of this discussion is whether the US government should prevent US citizens from accessing yet another product that is freely available in the rest of the world, to benefit a tiny handful of rich people in California.
Let me be clearer: if you do not hold stock in OpenAI or Anthropic, you likely stand to benefit from more AIs being provided by more providers. Imagine if the government had banned MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we all had to buy databases from Oracle and Microsoft. That would be strictly worse for everybody except employees of Oracle and Microsoft. This is exactly the same thing.