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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Why would the app stores agree to do that? Apple in particular is pretty well-known for refusing invasive government requests.

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India banned Tiktok and other Chinese Apps. Apple and Google complied with the government order.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/02/apple-google-comp...

Apple also removed a bunch of games on its Chinese app store because of new policies by the Chinese government.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21298811/apple-chinese-ap...

Apple regularly punishes privacy-invasive apps, and also apps that they and other tech giants deem misinformation (all apps are banned from presenting COVID-19 data, Infowars was deplatformed, etc). While they do stand up to OS-level encryption-breaking requests, they don't necessarily have a problem with banning apps.

What makes you say Apple is well-known for refusing invasive government requests? They’ve gladly been handling over all iCloud data for Chinese users to the CCP (meaning many of its users were unknowingly sharing all their sensitive videos/pictures/text with the authoritarian government). They’ve also been banning foreign apps from the Chinese App Store, and have similarly banned foreign apps in other countries, such as India.

In the US, they've repeatedly refused the FBI's demands to help unlock people's phones. They seem to view censorship as the price of doing business in other countries; I'm not exactly happy about that, but as far as I can tell it doesn't transfer over to their attitude stateside.

Because it would be the law

Maybe I'm missing something about the proposal here. Requests from the Secretary of State don't usually carry the force of law.

> Because it would be the law

What remains to be seen is if said law would be "legal" (as in: not in direct conflict with the constitution).

I'm not sure that a foreign company has any rights under the constitution to begin with. It's contentious whether or not it grants rights to a foreign citizen while they are outside of the US's borders, so claiming that ByteDance would have their constitutional rights violated by such a ban would be even more so.

However, if this were to happen, it would almost certainly be under national security law, which has pretty far reaching powers for this sort of thing. Knowing how much the app spies on you, and knowing that they are ultimately under control by the Chinese government, there's a very strong case to be made.

> I'm not sure that a foreign company has any rights under

> the constitution to begin with.

Would that be this foreign corporation that is incorporated in the checks notes State of California?

https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=03...

(Yes, I know this is a company owned by the Beijing based ByteDance but that’s not immediately disqualifying of this US corporation run under US law being able to defend itself in a US court system as any other US company would.)

It's not immediately disqualifying, no, but it would almost certainly be squashed quite quickly by the US's NSL. (Funny how the NSL in HK and the US are both so pertinent in China related discussions these past few days!)

Having set up a corporation on US soil does not grant free pass to a foreign government to spy on US citizens.

I would think it's actually Google and Apple's constitutional rights that would be at issue, since they're the ones hypothetically being restrained from publishing certain apps.

Which law are you referring to? To my knowledge there isn't a "Just do what I tell you to" law on the books. Apple and Google could decide willingly to ban the apps from their app stores but outside of that I'm curious what law could be brought to bear that would force them.

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