Why are these restrictions happening in the first place? Went looking for reasons beyond "China may/may not be using DJI for spying" but beyond conspiracy theories, is there any factual arguments behind the ban?
And since the US supposedly is pro-capitalism and free markets, wouldn't it make sense that someone in the US develops a superior consumer product and "defeats" the evil competitor products that way?
In a nutshell, what's happening here is that China is employing industrial policy strategically [1]. Drones are one example, but there are plenty of others like ship building, EVs, batteries, rare earths and many others [2].
The way this works is that industries are subsidized directly or indirectly to drive competition of the market and get to economies of scale. One sufficient scale is reached, it's very hard to for new companies to out-innovate incumbents (at least in capital intensive industries like manufacturing).
Now, to answer your question, protecting your domestic industry against unfair competition is giving local companies chance to innovate and establish domestic production - which in case of military conflict will play a decisive role [3] (noting that it doesn't have to be "domestic", but can be "friendshored" to allied countries, e.g. ship building in Korea and Japan).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/11/america-industrialpolic...
[3] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/were-not-ready-for-the-big-one
That spans from general context like real-estate, to specific context like social networks or search (eg Google and Facebook), to infrastructure (eg AWS), to Disney not being allowed to own its own parks, to McDonald's not being allowed to operate its own restaurants. In fact it's so bad, it's the exceptionally rare case where a business is allowed to own & operate its business fully in China.
When McDonalds can't even operate their restaurants in your country properly, you're blatantly on a particularly bad list of very authoritarian nations.
The opposite is overwhelmingly true in the US. You are free, at any time, to set up and fully own a business within the US (as a foreigner). You can even pick the state based on legal structural preferences. Almost anyone on HN can do it whenever they feel like it, it's fairly simple all things considered.
The US is a nation that allowed companies like Toyota to come in and hammer the domestic competition. It allowed foreign operators to hammer huge domestic employers in industries such as steel. The US has far more often than not tended to allow very friendly access to its gigantic market.
The mistake the US has made for decades is to go too easy on China in regards to how they block access to their domestic market. This is the era of reciprocation, as such China should be increasingly blocked from easy access to foreign markets until they reciprocate and open up access to their economy.
How, exactly, is national security even a reason? Ok, so the drone has a camera, but that doesn't mean someone can magically transport the data. Ok, so the drone has a LTE modem, that still has to be connected to US infrastructure once connected somewhere within the US.
So how is it supposed to be a national security issue? Sounds as harmful as a calculator.
The drone (and controller) needs internet connectivity to download firmware updates. The drone and controller both have wifi and both automatically connect to wifi when it's available.
> Sounds as harmful as a calculator.
More like a wifi-enabled calculator that self-installs firmware updates, and whose every use is controlled and tracked by a Chinese company who operates at the mercy of the Chinese government.
Source: owned a dji mini and own a DJI mini 2, very close friends with people who own the mini 3 and other, more expensive ones (with the video screen built in to the controller). I fly mine and use an old oled android phone as the video/telemetry screen - no sim card or cellular connectivity. I can take the whole setup to the middle of a forest with no connectivity at all and it will connect, fly, and record telemetry and video on the phone and on the SD card in the drone.
The threat vector for my usage pattern is basically, a rogue firmware update could transmit the video feed, telemetry, etc via controller wifi connection to DJI/China in real time.
For people flying in remote locations with no connectivity, the threat vector is a bit more complicated.
I guess I should turn my wifi off.
It's definitely thin with actual data, but it's also likely we don't have the data that the Senate/House do.
I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries.
I've read the reporting about TikTok, yes. Not sure if you linked the wrong article here, it doesn't mention DJI at all it seems.
> I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries.
GDPR doesn't require all EU data to be stored in EU, it requires companies that do store EU data to follow specific guidelines and regulations regarding transit and storage.
Before wanting something to be implemented in your country, you'd do yourself a service to read a bit more about it first :)