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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

If you can't compete, ban them!

You're right, it would be better if there was fair competition and we could let the market decide things. But that's not the status quo. The status quo is one party (China) has extremely protectionist policies and encourages IP theft from other countries. Because of this, companies in other countries are at a disadvantage competing in the Chinese market and against Chinese companies. So then you have to decide: is letting Chinese companies win the competition via unfair practices better or worse than engaging in tit-for-tat and levelling the playing field a bit?

Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product. If domestic companies require patronage from the state in order to remain in business, they should not exist, no matter the conditions in some other jurisdiction.

Citation needed.

> Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product.

In times of good economies, open borders, and peace, it might. But it also incurs significant risk if there are disruptions.

> If domestic companies require patronage from the state in order to remain in business, they should not exist, no matter the conditions in some other jurisdiction.

DJI and similar Chinese tech companies are benefiting from very significant protectionism, themselves. Should they not exist?

"Patronage from state" is a sensationalist way of putting us trying to avoid being overly dependent on a hostile dictatorship. Yes, the consumer will pay more but in this case it's worth it. It's like paying more for something because of insurance costs.

`Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product.`

So do lots of other things, and you need to balance competing sources of harm against each other. Allowing foreign companies benefitting from protectionist policies drive domestic industries out of business leaves consumers vulnerable to several other harms. You can't just do everything in a vacuum without considering the context because it's the "right thing to do" and expect the best outcomes.

Doesnt seem to hurt Chinese consumers much.

DJI, in particular has a bunch of phone-home kill switch stuff built in. The FAA mandated a lot of it, and now I think they realize that, in practice, that means they're mandating that the Chinese military has indirect control over drones operated by Americans on US soil.

I think it'd be better to ban remote kill switches and instead mandate GIS databases that warn you if you're violating airspace restrictions (for drones over a certain size, where this isn't adding a bunch of complexity).

Shielding domestic drone manufacturers from international competition essentially guarantees that we'll fall behind China. That will cause a national security issue worse than the current situation.

Sometimes I wonder if the regulators are intentionally screwing the US over, or if it's just that the federal government has become unable to coordinate the actions of its own agencies.

edit: The sibling comments are great examples of why we need strong privacy laws. If it was illegal for DJI to exfiltrate the data the drones gather back to their manufacturers, then those classes of national security issues would take care of themselves, and the rules would solve the problem for all industries, not just this one company.

> The FAA mandated a lot of it

Source?

I'm a Part 107 pilot, and none of the commercial stuff I fly has those restrictions.

There's an unlock mechanism in the DJI app for those with the appropriate license. There are plenty of restrictions without it.

I’m aware - but that’s a DJI thing, not an FAA requirement.

I dumped DJI when I couldn’t get it to unlock for a job at an airport.

Definitely a DJI thing since the Autel is way, way less restricted. I got annoyed that a few little barely-used airstrips seemed to enforce limitations on the entire county.

That's not really a fair assessment of the situation. The real (and valid) concern is that DJI's commercial products dominate the market for land/resource development, agriculture, infrastructure, chemical refining and pipelines, and other segments, and the software platform is capable of exfiltrating data (flight telemetry, imaging, etc.) back to a firm with strong ties to Chinese government and state enterprises.

Amazingly that wasn't an issue for over a decade, before the trade and proxy wars started...

The trade jingoism is only part of it. A decade ago, drone tech, including DJI's was far less mature, and not nearly as widely adopted as it is today.

My concern isn't about competition but that since the drones dial home and get over the air updates, there's little that would prevent China from using it to gather images and location data that that we wouldn't want them to (private/commercial/military).

Why not ban that, then? Similar to concerns re: TikTok propaganda, it seems like the solution is not to solve the problem but to try and limit the bad things to being done by American companies.

This applies even more to teh chinese EV import bans.

It seems if the USactually wanted people to drive EVs and put photovoltaic on their houses that they would embrace Chinese government subsidized products. Why wouldn't we want the Chinese subsidy to advance the US's electrification?

WRT the the security vulnerabiliters, this is just another case of protecting US surveilance companies.

A law to ban all user data collection and exfiltration would be the most benificial to the population, but I think goggle would have a few complaints.

More like if you can't control them. Drones put a lot of power back into citizens and that's not great for those in charge.

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The US federal government's hostility towards DJI is tangential to its hostility towards drone operators in general. There are real national security concerns about the ability for DJI's devices and software platforms to exfiltrate sensitive data that could be used for military strategy, corporate espionage, or even things like gaining unfair advantages in real estate and infrastructure development deals.

It's interesting how advocating for backdoors into consumer products (like the US wanted DJI to do) suddenly makes you uneasy that there are other backdoors into those products.

I don't like Apple, but this was exactly their argument against putting in backdoors to unlock people's devices, and I support them in that.

Ironically this actually helped Honda in the end, when it was Harley Davidson lobbying US gov for help.

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