MOST concerning is the fact that WeChat will be banned. To many Asian demographics, that's a mainstream chat application for keeping in touch with family.
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...
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)
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.
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.