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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Those are valid concerns. I also think the opposite side of that coin is worth considering. That is to say, should we allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil or should we minimize total damage by cutting it off now instead of later?

As for me, I believe allowing WeChat to become anything like the structural institution it is in China in any part of the US would be a mistake. Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.

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You really need to explain your point more thoroughly.

- "allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil" - does this mean have more users?

- "minimize total damage" - it would be good if you articulated the damage being done

- "Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese" - according to Julian Assange, https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Google employees being fans of the person who lost the Presidential election doesn't make Google a cheerleader for the government.

Google was an active collaborator with the state, on not just intelligence gathering but on soft-power influence-pushing (according to that article).

Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.

The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.

The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.

Yes. A ban now will be less disruptive than a ban later when WeChat has far more American users. The damage I refer to is the damage to to the lives and habits of WeChat's current American and immigrant users caused by WeChat's removal.

> Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.

Imagine that! Imagine if some US agency had a global dragnet surveillance network!

For a long time, USPS was directly controlled by government, yet was also one of the only ways for people to communicate long distance. Government could easily have made laws like "we will read all your mail", or "we won't deliver mail to political enemies".

Yet that didn't happen. Why are things turning out differently in the internet age?

A counterpoint is that the telephone infrastructure has been tapped by the US government to monitor even citizens conversations. My opinion is that since it requires fewer people it is easier to do. I don't think the CCP is as concerned with chinese citizens knowing what they are doing like the US seems to

> I don't think the CCP is as concerned with chinese citizens knowing what they are doing

If you ask a random Chinese citizen "are you okay with the government listening in to your phone calls?", most people would say Yes. Having the government listen in and having government presence on the streets makes us feel safe, because most of us trust our government. Sure, it has it's issues, but in general, the government acts in our favor, and without it we'd have far lower standards of living.

The US is a total polar opposite in this regard.

That random Chinese citizen is afraid to say no, and assuming you will report them.

If they are against it, then yes they may likely say no out of fear. But make no mistake, many are for it. Not everyone shares the same values we do in America.

How many Chinese have you had intimate conversations with about this?

This is one really important counterpoint. The internet made it more economical.

Another is that in days before the internet, the technology for small numbers of people to cause mass violence did not exist.

> Yet that didn't happen

The USPS did do exactly that. Read about how abolitionists attempted to spread anti-slavery literature through the federal postal system in the antebellum era, and how the post office decided it would suppress those mailings for being supposedly insurrectionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

But also, the government in the 19th century was much weaker than it became in the 20th and now 21st centuries.

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