China, Icahn, and Apple

I was surprised by an article in the Financial Times this past weekend about Carl Icahn selling his huge amount of stock in Apple because of how he felt about the Chinese government's relationship with them.  It turns out CNBC carried a number of stories that are well done and very detailed.  Josh Horwitz summarized these well in a Quartz article at http://qz.com/673035/carl-icahn-sold-his-apple-stake-because-he-is-worried-about-chinas-dictatorship-government/.

It appears Apple is doing something Trend Micro and a few others have done - say "no" to China's new policy on turning over source code to the government.  Horwitz also points out that Apple had previously complied with Chinese law on other elements of their intrusive laws, including storage of data from their country on servers inside China, and censorship.  Turning over source code is something nobody in their right mind would ever do, and apparently Tim Cook is still fine in that area.  But Icahn may be right about the fallout from this decision.  Harmony will not follow from a clash with the guys at the top.  It is, however, unfortunate that Apple should be penalized for doing the right thing.  Carl Icahn is the one penalizing them.

We should probably look more closely at U.S. Companies that do turn over their source code.  This is one battle that a few companies should not be fighting on their own.  Most of the times companies do it and say nothing about it.   Have we heard Microsoft, IBM, or Intel mention whether they have turned over source code to the Chinese government?   Once the government has the source code they can sell that software, modify it, or decompose it to see how it really works.  That will directly undermine the proprietary software and damage our company's market position.  They will use it to compete directly with the companies that supply that code.  Mr. Icahn might want to take a longer view of this issue and praise Apple for what it did.  Then, he should be using his market position to find out which companies have given away their future by providing source code to the very government that steals it from us all the time.

While we are at it, we need to get the Obama Administation off of its backside to start doing something to protect our industries that operate in China.  If China wants to play this game, there should be reciprocity.  No Chinese company can operate in the US unless it has a partnership with a similar US company, and they provide source code to the U.S. Government.  Why do we continue to allow China to make up its own rules and try to get the rest of the world to play by them?