WeChat ban is just evil, no justifiable benefit. Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
I’m skeptical of the security issue. If China wanted to inject spyware into American’s phones, there are so many apps to choose from, including lots of apps with millions of installs from no-name developers that could easily be compromised. If the US wants to protect citizens against these threats, they can have entities with infosec skills like the NSA or CISA work with Apple/Google to help detect threats in the app review process. My guess is that programs like this are already in place. Blocking just a couple of economically significant apps doesn’t seem like the way you’d go about pursuing that goal. It smells like a pretext for firing a few more shots in the trade war.
America is not China and should not frame its policies based on China's policies. While, I agree there is a need to retaliate but 'be like China' is hardly the way to do it.
Cheap labor for US manufacturing
I don't think the time "to take the high road against bad actors is over", but the time to take the complacent and hopeful road definitely is over.
US didn't even bother to find a plausible excuse
I'm not going to defend thr Tiktok thing, but its basically equally dumb, its just that here teens dunking on the government isn't a crime.
This is true of all apps coming out of the US with the NSA. Should Google, Facebook, Netflix be banned in Europe?
> and we're entering a trade war.
The trade war started a while ago and I'm pretty sure China is winning it.
The EU historically has depended on alliance and trade with the US. If that corrodes, then it would make sense for them to ban those at a certain point. I doubt we're there yet though.
> The trade war started a while ago and I'm pretty sure China is winning it.
That's irrelevant to what I said.
Military protection from whom? Russia? Russia is not in a place to attack Europe. And the US can barely protect themselves from Russia. Who do you think the US is protecting Europe from? Because the saviour of Europe seems to be Turkey and their willingness to keep all the refugees at their border instead of letting them flood into Europe.
And I don't think Europe relies on the US for trade. They export more to Swizterland and the UK than they do the US.The US are a massive trading partner, but to say they rely on them is a flasehood.
And let's remember the EU has banned American products before. Apple is the main contender for those bans.
Is there a decent European alternative to Google and Facebook?
I have a strong feeling that it might not be the case at all, given that Russia also has access to Google/FB, and yet they have their own viable and massively popular competitors (Yandex for Google, VK for Facebook).
This sentence seems wrong on multiple levels. One it implies that Europe has been trying to build competitors and failing. Europe hasn't been, Europe has been trying to tax and control Google and Facebook. Which they've been doing rather well.
It implies that Europe can't build these. Which is really messed up since both those companies have multiple offices in Europe. And that both those companies are largely built by non-us born people.
It fails to understand or at least tries to frame away from the value a site like Facebook has, which is its user base. Even for it's users the value is the other users. Nearly everyone is on Facebook, even if they don't use it regularly.
> I have a strong feeling that it might not be the case at all, given that Russia also has access to Google/FB, and yet they have their own viable and massively popular competitors (Yandex for Google, VK for Facebook).
Facebook got into its dominant position not because other countries didn't have viable competitors. It's that all the competitors were bought up by companies that ran them into the ground.
Russia like China is a country that doesn't aim to be best friends with the US and has propaganda to boost it's own countries offerings, while actively trying to build its own offerings. Russia has more investment into its own services. The US also has lots of investments into offerings from the US. While Europe doesn't really match up. And there isn't even really a specific EU silicon valley competitor, London and Berlin both seem to be in the mix.
My original point is, if Facebook and Google aren't there, there would be a replacement extremely quickly. The revenue these companies make show it's clear there is value in building these service and if the current providers don't exist other companies will want to take that revenue. The technical know-how of how to build these is there. The desire and a realistic chance of success of competing with established companies are not.
Just because some people want to turn the US into a mini PRC doesn't mean we have to embrace their noxious, evil value system.
There are also many non-Chinese that use wechat.
Are there?
To a certain extent, yes. A lot of foreign relations is about reciprocation and self-interest. For many, many years the US tolerated CCP polices that hurt its interests with the hope that, over time, that would cause the CCP would liberalize. That hasn't happened, and it's clear it won't happen anytime soon.
We should also reciprocate CCP's oppression of Uighurs in concentration camps by ramping up our oppression in ICE camps, right?
Yes, they do some evil spyware things, but so do many US apps as well.
> no justifiable benefit.
Maybe to you, but this does not apply to everyone. This is supposed to be a free country, but projecting one person's idea of benefits on everyone is exactly the opposite of a free country.
> Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
Well yes, people need a way to talk to their family, and we shouldn't be taking out country politics on civilians' basic human needs, including both visitors and US citizens with family in China. As a free country we should be respecting the needs of the overseas Chinese and overseas everyone-else who is here.
While I do support apps not being evil, I don't think the right answer is to ban WeChat. Rather, the right answer is better and stricter privacy controls on phone OSes that prevent these apps from doing evil things, like arbitrarily scanning your Wi-Fi networks, which both WeChat and Google do.
LineageOS (Android fork) has a good set of tools for this and can run WeChat just fine while spoofing fake data to their servers for most of these spy attempts.