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Comment by envy2 | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible development and precedent. Whatever you think of the CCP and the Chinese approach to censorship and tech, building our own 'Great Firewall' and banning foreign apps/services we don't like is not the answer. It just legitimises the Chinese approach and sends us further down the road to a fragmented rather than open internet.

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I think it's reasonable to do for national security purposes, just like I think it's reasonable to disentangle U.S. industries from Chinese companies that pose national security threats and steal trade secrets.

So as a matter of principle, at least, I'm fine with it. I can't say I feel great about the wisdom of banning Tiktok in particular, but I won't let that confuse me into disagreeing with the underlying principle.

> I think it's reasonable to do for national security purposes

Haven't the most egregious erosions of civil liberties (Patriot Act for example) been implemented using the same argument? Not commenting on the validity of your position specifically, but your reasoning for it seems like it could be applied to just about anything regardless of how well it fits into the idea of a free and open democracy

>Haven't the most egregious erosions of civil liberties (Patriot Act for example) been implemented using the same argument?

Oh, definitely. I think those excesses which have been justified under the pretense of national security have been quite terrible, and I think that they are bad for reasons particular to those cases and arguments.

I don't take it to mean we should not have a concept of national security, or that we are so helpless that we can't meaningfully engage in case by case analysis of what to do in specific situations. It could be applied to anything if one isn't willing to distinguish between different cases based on their merits.

> Haven't the most egregious erosions of civil liberties (Patriot Act for example) been implemented using the same argument?

Yes. We should be careful about it. That’s why I’m against secret courts. But this action us happening in the open, and ByteDance will have a chance to challenge it in court. (Something no American company could do in China.)

Just because something can be abused doesn’t mean it is always abusive.

Also "national security purposes" is exactly what the Chinese government said when they banned Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Agree. I don't use or like tiktok but it's sad to see the internet walls setting in. Inevitable perhaps, but sad nonetheless

I don't think this will be a "Great Firewall".

The app will be banned from the stores, advanced users could still install the app by getting the APK.

not on ios. also, i'm afraid banning in the US here means actually banning it worldwide. or that will be the next step. it would be easy to force apple to just pull it from the app store. and no, people won't just install it from the apk. maybe 1% know how to do that, so it'll be a ghost town anyway

That is a risk of a walled garden like iOS.

There's always the web. Good luck banning a website.

In France they use lying DNS.

Most of the users have their default DNS set up: the ISP ones, and the french ISP dns' must comply to the law.

If you want to access SciHub for exemple, you need to change your DNS config to something else.

> change your DNS config to something else

Trivial

Oh yes, but most of the people doesn't know, so it's effective.

At some level, that's also how the "Great Firewall" works. Avoiding it is inconvenient enough that most users don't even know how to do it.

It's far more hard, and dangerous to avoid it.

You can still sideload on iOS with cydia impactor. It's a bigger hassle though, because you need to resign every 7 days.

It's reciprocity. China built a great firewall, and now countries are just merely putting their own locks to the gates to prevent the China from having free access to their own markets while refusing to provide the same.

If it's reciprocity, then perhaps the government should state so, lest people think the US is becoming China.

Unless there's a third path, there really is no choice but to act in kind.

The third path is to not ban anything.

I think that's what this is really about. Trump and the various neocons filling his cabinet have decided to try and do to TikTok what China has done to many US companies through its onerous censorship requirements and preferential treatment of domestic technology companies. This is a case of blatant tit-for-tat. What this boils down to is conservatives in the executive branch not wanting Chinese technology companies to be able to do business in the US. There is an argument that this is justified given the protectionism China has demonstrated towards its own tech sector. Ultimately though this escalation is probably bad for Chinese-US relations and the Internet as a whole.

It's possible for this to completely backfire though. Suppose Microsoft pays tens of billions to ByteDance to acquire TikTok's US operations and then the app tanks in popularity or fails to reach profitability. This seems especially possible given how new TikTok is and the faddish rise and fall of many other video-based platforms (Vine, HQTrivia, Pariscope, etc.)

Open internet is dead. It really sucks, I also had big dreams about it but it done for.

Twitter, FB, Alphabet excercise absolute control over censoring people they do not like(who are most likely wrong but that is not the point). Saw what happened with those docs video that Trump retweeted?

Open internet is long gone.

Sorry, you're conflating two entirely different things. An individual platform or service choosing to moderate content (which basically every website / app involving UGC does in one form or another) is in no way the same as censorship by the state.

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