TikTok to be banned from US app stores from Sunday
ft.com
ft.com
What's more disappointing is watching the thunderous applause from technologists here and elsewhere as software is outlawed which is not otherwise illegal and is not being litigated as illegal. We should not cheer on the restriction of any software on nationalistic terms. Content is one thing, physical equipment another, but algorithms should be borderless. Most in the community disagree with encryption export restrictions, why can't they similarly disagree with software import restrictions? 2A groups recognize slippery slope precedents, why can't technologists?
If the content/data is being harvested and/or managed illegally, then make that illegal and/or prosecute under that pretense (even if the evidence is subject to national security non-disclosure). Otherwise, it's obvious this is political posturing at the cost of digital freedom. It should be as widely condemned as government surveillance has been.
China currently has that---it ignores IP laws, when it suits them, but enforces them when it suits them. It forces ownership requirement rules on foreign companies within China, but encourages Chinese-backed take over of foreign companies outside of China.
It bans foreign products within its country, to protect homegrown companies (or steals the IP, then bans the competition if it can't buy out the devalued company).
In the case of trade between two multi-trillion dollar economies (US & China), if one side never retaliates over bad faith, and always is more permissive than the other then that side is bound to lose out.
The way China is behaving, and has behaved for the past 30+ years, is unfair and detrimental to US companies and trading partners. It may sting in the short term to be denied Chinese financial support, and Chinese products but in the long term this is the only way to either force China apply parity and fairness in its own rulings, or stimulate a local economy that isn't wholly dependent and subordinate to Chinese interests.
You may be willing to give up liberty in exchange for some leveling of economic advantage, but you cannot also say that you are not, in fact, giving up that measure of liberty.
I don't actually use TikTok, btw.
Our supposed difference is that we have a system of laws and accountability and doing business with the US isn't at the whim of a manchild like China.
This is not a good thing.
Being morally right is of no use when it hurts your own citizens.
If the US had a problem with tiktok they could've implemented a privacy framework and put everyone on that standard.
China could be using the Tiktok data and doing similar things which Russia and others did with FB data.
What privacy framework? How would that prevent China from accessing Tiktok data?
Thank you, well said kodablah. This conflict-seeking behavior, this sudden slamming the door: it's a threat to functioning world order & against civic cause.
Right. Instead of selectively banning apps like TikTok ban all chinese apps, that would be fair to china
Are you saying we should trust communists with our data? This should have been Apple’s move! But they failed us.
The rest of the world really needs to free itself from American monopoly big tech.
It is simply unacceptable that I, a European in a European country, can have arbitrary apps on my phone blocked and removed by the whims of the American president.
I prefer to be able to install updates from one place.
But it is a tool, not a store, not a repository. One points apt at whatever repositories they want. Thus folks like Ubuntu can fork Debian but use the same apt tool; create their own repository & point /etc/apt/sources.list at their repository rather than Debians.
Apt goes further still. Debian doesn't/can't provide Google Chrome in their repos, but I can add a Google repository to /etc/apt/sources.list, and now my package manager can install Chrome. One can also do wild things like have both Debian & Ubuntu repositories listed in sources.list, and mix and match packages from the two, & manage/prioritize where to prefer to install from if unspecified.
In contrast, we see other comments mentioning F-Droid (which requires elevated permissions most users don't have access to, i believe) as a good shop, versus Play Store. But even if that is the case, there are now multiple separate managers running on a system, each tied to their own repository, where-as by contrast, if apt were running on a phone, it could manage whatever set of repositories/stores the user selected, in a consistent central fashion.
This model seems ideal to me. There are multiple repositories (stores) where one can install from, using a common, local package management tool that interfaces with these repositories. It has the upside of creating a good way to manage the system, & that manager can interface & harness many different sources of software concurrently.
They depend on others or they install malwares on their computers, do you want the same to be happening on their phones?
Specifically, he makes the argument that the "American" internet is favorable to creating companies b/c it's effectively a wild west (with limited regulations and laws which favor the corporations, along with a relatively-rich user base). This allows many companies to start in America and then expand globally, which in turn allows the US to exercise soft power abroad.
To change the status quo, in Europe in particular, would require either gov't intervention on what can be accessed via the internet (closer to what India is doing) OR more favorable laws to the creation of small tech cos (which unfortunately is not what regulation like GDPR accomplishes).
Not saying I agree with all of it, but it's interesting to think about the nation-scale incentives to create global internet superpowers.
The Commerce Department choosing not to go that broad doesn't make it less concerning that they can go that broad.
The Federal government's primary function is to regulate interstate and international affairs.
Well, I think in Europe you could probably have regulators say that these apps have to be available in order for the companies to operate in the EU or in specific countries. Not that I think that's a good idea, and the EU's approach to try and placate both China and the US has been a failure in my view (both are just taking advantage of fragmented EU member state interests).
But let's take a broad perspective here. Countries all throughout the world can take actions that have consequences in other countries. The EU implements a tax on US tech companies or regulations (which I do largely agree with, but that's besides the point) and that affects me in the US. With a globalized world, it should be obvious that when the big movers make moves, things will reverberate around the world.
Here's another example, I am (if you take a look at my post history you can confirm this! :) ) a HUGE fan of the Apple App Store model. If the EU forces Apple to allow multiple app stores, I imagine Apple will do that in the US too. It is simply unacceptable that I, as an American in America, can have arbitrary rules and regulations imposed on me by the whims of the EU bureaucracy.
Blaming a foreign country for something Apple might do voluntarily (but most probably would not because they have to reason to harms their own interest) is absurd.
Later we learned that it was only going to be removed from app stores, which is easy enough for me to work around. But I really don't appreciate this move by the government.
Not to understate all the awful things that the CCP has done and is continuing to do, but I'd rather not see the USA become the authoritarian government that it's trying to combat.
How about ordering app stores to put a warning label that the app may be leaking data to hostile foreign governments, rather than taking away MY choice to use the app?
Realistically, if it came down to it my plan was to buy a VPN to china, and if that wasn't good enough to unlock wechat, to send relatives an iPhone. A simple app store block is a lot easier to get around, luckily.
For the latter, I don't know if this still works but last time I visited China my Google Fi plan (which has a built in VPN https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9040000?hl=en ) actually worked with no further changes, so I was able to pretend I was on western internet over 4G the entire time I was in China. This was in early 2019.
Which is lucky for me because the school VPN I was initially relying on stopped working halfway through the trip.
The google suite is banned, FB is off the table, WhatsApp works sometimes (I imagine strained relationships between FB / China), Skype is alright, although pretty laggy.
The ones I've found reliable are: - Zoom - Facetime (I imagine this benefits from Apple's relationship wit the Chinese govt) - WeChat (soon deprecated)
WebRTC-based software? (e.g. Jitsi Meet, https://meet.jit.si)
I honestly don't think anyone knows what the policy actually is. The administration cares more about soundbites than policy, but the people who need to administer it don't really seem to know what to do. It would be funny if it wasn't so terribly sad.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/impending-wechat...
Really? Whatsapp is mainstream app not the wechat.
As far as I know, as part of it, it's definitely dominant in the Chinese Diaspora.
Actually, just checking now, 1.2 billion users.
One would think that instead of cutting channels, the US would prefer to expand them, so that china residents would not only be theoretically aware of the greater nominal US GDP, but also could practically see for themselves all the material advantages[1] that freedom brings.
Goldstein: "... the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison."
[1] not to mention that there is always a wider story than necessarily that shown by their international coverage. For instance, a quick search for (pardon my machine translation) "美国国际新闻" on youku got me https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDcwNTI3OTk4NA==.html which is obviously not representative of the US as a whole.
https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerc...
> As of September 20, 2020, for WeChat and as of November 12, 2020, for TikTok, the following transactions are prohibited:
Any provision of internet hosting services enabling the functioning or optimization of the mobile application in the U.S.; Any provision of content delivery network services enabling the functioning or optimization of the mobile application in the U.S.; Any provision directly contracted or arranged internet transit or peering services enabling the function or optimization of the mobile application within the U.S.; Any utilization of the mobile application’s constituent code, functions, or services in the functioning of software or services developed and/or accessible within the U.S.
Interestingly the list of prohibited transactions includes "internet transit/peering enabling the functioning of Tiktok" in the U.S, among other things.
I've written my own BGP implementation and even I'm not quite sure what they mean by this. My best guess is this means ISPs operating in the US can't directly peer with a network that enables the functioning of TikTok, but probably doesn't go as far as requiring them to block any IP address ranges received indirectly via other networks.
This applies both to TikTok and WeChat.
This is under the Emergency Economic Powers Act, which derives its authority from the interstate commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution. There's a free speech issue here - can one distribute free software despite the wishes of the administration? ACLU says the administration went too far.[2] Expect a lawsuit shortly.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/11/2020-17...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/dont-ban-tiktok-and-we...
If we box Americans out of it entirely, how will that affect travel to China? Will people pick up cheap/limited-use androids at the airport that they can use for all these functions?
There's an HK version of WeChat pay which is more open but isn't very widely used since we have had the Octopus stored value card for nearly 25 years which serves a similar purpose. For everything else there's MasterCard (or Visa / AE).
Obviously, that's because new Huawei phones won't be able to ship with the Google Play services, so they had to invest in this, to be able to deliver a decent app ecosystem to their users and thus stay afloat...
But this also means that it's thus a viable alternative (unencumbered by US diktats) to distribute stuff like Wechat and Tiktok, example:
https://appgallery.huawei.com/#/app/C5683
Obviously, enabling a third party store is still a form of sideloading, which opens you up to risks, but at least people won't have to manually manage APKs
The silver lining is that this might increase competition, and let also other 3rd party stores thrive (i.e. F-Droid, Amazon store, etc.)
Compare this scenario vs. trying to prevent people from using, say, irssi (or any IRC client) where the source code is available from a thousand places and one can simply compile it locally.
And why did it not do whatever it was supposed to do?
What's the legislative authority for this?
If not, who decides what software is allowed or not? Will I need to get a license from the government before I push my PR to a repo?
> Yes, all photography is speech and any form of photography should be allowed.
> If not, who decides which photography is allowed or not? Will I need to get a license from the government before I publish a photograph online?
You see the problem here, don't you? There are many cases where a photograph can be illegal.
Legally, whether photographs are speech seems to come down to whether they are taken with communicative intent or not.
There's no evidence at all that software can in any capacity be speech as defined under the us constitution.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
It is a stretch, however, to present this decision as a precedent preventing the government from regulating application markets.
Orange guerrilla marketing for the win!
On a more serious note, I wonder how this can be enforced? Prevent distribution on Play store and apple store? Can't you just sideload on android? You have to prevent connections to the server side right? Maybe via ISP providers or mobile companies to get them to prevent access?
Why would they have to do that? Most Americans probably can't tell the difference between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or other East Asian names. I guess if Fox News starts publishing "this is what a Chinese name is" we should worry (not that I should give them any ideas), but I really doubt that'll happen. Americans don't like the Chinese government, and for extremely good reason.
> On a more serious note, I wonder how this can be enforced? Prevent distribution on Play store and apple store? Can't you just sideload on android? You have to prevent connections to the server side right? Maybe via ISP providers or mobile companies to get them to prevent access?
Yea it'll be blocked on the official distribution channels. You'll probably be able to side load it, but lots of people don't know how to do that and probably don't care enough. I guess we'll find out what happens. The US can certainly have companies like ISPs comply here.
Sure you can pirate it, but anyone involved in procuring or operating a banned app would be violating this order.
It's like saying "oh guns are banned but can't I just call someone I know who can get me a gun?"
> It's like saying "oh guns are banned but can't I just call someone I know who can get me a gun?
I mean... that's how lots of people get illegal things. Drugs? Etc.