China doesn't allow US companies to do so in China, so why should Chinese companies be permitted?
What if WeChat just suddenly gets popular in the US? What should the US do in that situation?
I think the US should pass and aggressively enforce anti-snooping laws. No company allowed to monitor communication of customers over whatever platform that company is selling (unless the product requires it or that IS the service - some sort of Mood Analysis API or whatever). Would also conveniently take care of a key net neutrality point :)
WeChat will not suddenly get popular in the US because it sucks. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have survived in China without the firewall. But assuming it did, I think the correct response is to require it to have end to end encryption.
Claims of end to end encryption are pretty worthless if you don't trust the provider and haven't audited their source code.
Block it (or heavily regulate it), pending a reciprocal opening of their market.
The whole "be open, lead by example, and they'll do the same" hasn't worked with China very well.
Blocking LoL is fine by me. China's blocked Google.
They do block Google and Facebook. By censoring an entire country following that logic the internet as we know it would be a country-by-country intranet. Best case would be a game of "ACCEPT OUR SERVICES OR ELSE"
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are all largely owned by foreign investors, even though they are operated by Chinese personnel.
[1] http://www.4-traders.com/TENCENT-HOLDINGS-LTD-3045861/compan...
[2] http://www.4-traders.com/ALIBABA-GROUP-HOLDING-17916677/comp...
[3] http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-majo...
Tencent: 40% foreign owned Alibaba: 45% foreign owned Baidu: 35% foreign owned
None of those are majority or controlling stakes. Which is hardly the...
> Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are all largely owned by foreign investors, even though they are operated by Chinese personnel.
...of the ancestor comment.
China has long welcomed foreign investment while simultaneously rejecting foreign control.
China doesn't allow a lot of things, that's a pretty weak argument.
If China wants 'special rules' it shall have 'special rules'.
Even if it's only a frivolous one like SnapChat.
Non-reciprocal trade/investment policy that disadvantages US companies, that's the legal reason right there. I understand a lot of trade policy is driven by similar kinds of things (e.g. reciprocally drop your tariffs and we'll drop ours).
I think your argument makes some sense, but I don't think the world needs an escalation of isolationism. Isolationism breeds war, and it only escalates significantly when multiple nations take part.
I don't like isolationism either, but in this case I believe it's justified.
The first amendment only applies to Americans.
Murdoch "became a naturalized U.S. citizen (and as a result, gave up Australian citizenship) in 1985 to satisfy the legal requirement for U.S. television ownership"
No, the first amendment (like the bill of rights generally) applies to the actions of the US government; it does not apply only when those actions effect US citizens.
That can backfire very quickly, when Europe is going to say the same – no US firm should be permitted to control any system widely used in the EU.
Which would kill Google, Microsoft, and many more.
And maybe European states should. The USA and China (maybe Russia to some degree too) are the only states that have control over the main tech players whose products are used by their population. If there ever were to be a war-like scenario again with internet embargos for Europe, the internet would be a very empty space, smartphones would degrade to next to useless bricks and businesses that switched to the cloud would lose their IT backbone.
> That can backfire very quickly, when Europe is going to say the same – no US firm should be permitted to control any system widely used in the EU.
China is a somewhat special case, though. It's an explicitly authoritarian oligarchy that have a proclivity for censorship and control. They should get more scrutiny from other liberal regimes than the US.
Though, if Europe wanted to disadvantage US communication products, I think they'd have a more than enough justification by citing NSA mass surveillance.
The USA is not China, it is a much more open market that has no qualms about “taking your money.” Ya, we aren’t going to sell them anything that gives them tech they don’t have already (high end fabbing or jet turbine production), but snap is much more of a business idea than a technology.