Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
albeit not outright banned it all together but sometimes they prefer homegrown company/technology
No they absolutely do just ban them.
It's not just that Google or FB can't operate Chinese-specific sites as a business within China, from within China you can't even get to the foreign/international versions of those sites, because they're blocked by China's firewall. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
Do you think there were many people standing outside of government buildings in Beijing protesting the potential ban of Facebook and Google while politicians of different political parties were debating the ban in the country's primary legislative body? Do you think you could launch a campaign for office on repealing said ban in China?
Anyone who disagrees with this is either not being honest or is not aware of what extent China restricts it's citizens.
I see multiple comments saying "shut up, we're not China!", but that's not what I meant :-). I just meant that there is some irony here.
And that next time we criticize China's protectionism, we may take a step back and think that we do it too, sometimes.
> I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism
The irony I see is that we criticize their protectionism, but we also do some kind of protectionism. More largely, we criticize the fact that they ban US companies, and then we do the same. How in the world is that not ironic?
It would be perfectly fine to admit it and acknowledge that actually, sometimes protectionism makes sense. But if you look at the answers in this thread, it seems like nobody wants to do that. "We are never wrong, it is not ironic, it is obviously national security".
So let's talk about national security. TikTok is a userspace social media app, just like Instagram or Snapchat. If collecting that kind of data is an obvious national security risk, then every single country in the world should ban them. What would the US say if all the western countries banned their social media? Would you say "we understand, it's a national security issue"? My guess is that you would say "but for us it's different: we are the good guys".
What about Huawei? Fair enough, infrastructures like antennas are very sensitive, don't let a Chinese company own them on your soil. But the smartphones? Really? Any government can buy stuff like NSO's Pegasus and get access to any mobile phone (iPhones included). Let's not pretend that someone buying a Huawei phone makes that worse, shall we? And it's still obviously fine to ask sensitive personalities (like politicians) to use a non-Chinese smartphone, but that's very different from banning the brand entirely.
DJI then? The drones don't have an Internet connection: you have to connect them to your WiFi (be it at home or a mobile hotspot from your phone). That means that if you fly above government facilities, the drone is not streaming the video to China. That also means that if it wanted to, it would have to go through your mobile hotspot, through your ISP. Doesn't seem that hard to ask government drone operators to connect through a firewall, does it? Every big company in the world asks all of their employees to do that.
And when did it start being seen as a security issue? Precisely when western companies started lobbying against them because they could not compete. Nobody complained about DJI for years, especially not when the view in western startups was "we are better, we will make a better drone". It took us to realise that DJI was actually a lot better than us to start looking for other ways. Look at who's been lobbying a lot for the ban: western drone companies that have no reason to know about security, but that are struggling because - let's be honest - DJI drones are a lot cheaper and a lot better than anything else.
And now we have US billionaires and owners of the biggest tech companies in the world publicly interfering with politics in allied countries. How the hell is that not ironic?
Btw, Huawei in particular stole a ton of technology over the past couple of decades, from Cisco and others. Not sure if the smartphone ban had the same cause, but at this point I don't really care, the company deserves it.
Right. Obvious national security reason.
That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.
I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have very significant national security risks.
because it's impossible.
the US offloaded low-added-value manufacturing to China, exchanging paper dollars for cheap industrial goods. When China tries to upgrade to high-added-value industries, like chips, guess what? National security risks!
just enjoy cheap goods and nature resources from 3rd world...
In the above provided examples its quite clear that there are possible national security risks involved with China being involved in US infrastructure and technology. If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If you have better example beyond hyperbole I am all ears.
1. of course there'll be no 'national security risks' because EU is an ally, and the US is spying on it
2. even though, troubles come to US's allies sometimes, like what Alstom and ASML met
3. EU products are mostly less compatible, overall, it cannot challenge the position where the US holds in the global value chain, so pose less of threat
Do the five eyes and other countries have national intelligence that are collecting data, absolutely. I cannot recall any recent published articles about overt Western corporate espionage and especially any that were supported by a parent country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24992485
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57302806
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Parliamentary_Committee...
And this is just one known case of the US spying on allies.
Can you tell me - in your logic - why the hell there is a need to ban DJI if it's okay for the CCP to spy on the US government? Or will you now say "It's not okay because it's not the US"? Or maybe "It's okay to spy on allies, but not on adversaries, except if you are the US because then it's okay to do both"?
I didn't expect so many people to attack me when I said it was ironic. I find it ironic, period. It doesn't mean that I support China or that I hate the US. It only means precisely what I said: I find it ironic to criticise China's ban on US companies and end up banning Chinese companies for what seems to be protectionism.
Now you've been repeating that it is obviously a strong national security threat, but whenever I asked you to elaborate on that, you avoided it. Would that mean that it's maybe not that obvious?
If DJI was from the EU, the US would manage to buy it.
After all, we know for a fact that the US have been spying on European politicians.
> We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the major mainland corporations.
And who holds seats/has major influence in the US government?
After your first comment, this thread was "the USA are an information security risk".
My point is that of course, from the US point of view, China abusing its power is worse than the US abusing their power. But if you take a step back... why should a European citizen consider that what China is doing is worse than what the US are doing?
It has been proven that the US have been targeting European politicians with spying. It has been proven that the NSA was collecting private information about just everything they could (including US citizen BTW). The richest people on Earth control the biggest tech companies on Earth and are getting closer to the US president every day. Some of those people are actively trying to influence politics in Europe (e.g. promoting neo-nazis in Germany, I don't know if you understand what it means there). The US president is talking about invading Greenland, Panama etc. And you talk about links between the Chinese government and Chinese companies?
If TikTok is a strong national security risk for the US, then Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple are all strong security risks for Europe. But what would the US say if Europe banned those companies? Probably more "it's a free market, it's democracy, it's capitalism, you can't do that!" than "fair enough, we do it too, and China does it too", right?
That's where I find it ironic. The US promote free market when it's about having their companies in other countries. But when the roles are inverted, then the US behave a lot more like China than like Europe (by banning companies), don't they?
> its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Okay, let's take drones. Can you articulate concretely one of those "obvious threat vectors"? For instance, a DJI drone does not come with an Internet connection magically embedded into it. So you can be completely offline while you fly your mission.
Are you scared that the drone may save a 4K video in a hidden storage, and then upload GBs of it when you connect it to the Internet without you having a chance to see it? Why not instructing government operators to only connect through a router that filters the network? And that would be on top of the DJI Local Data mode that you don't have to trust.
Or are you scared that the drone may store few bytes of critical information? What would that be, a location? Why wouldn't the CCP just hack the smartphone of the employee, e.g. using something like NSO Pegasus (which is western technology, but I won't call any irony there)?
If it is obvious, please explain the national security threat caused by DJI drones that couldn't be solved with a simple external firewall.
But no, there is absolutely no reason to think that the US may be doing corporate espionage /s.
I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.
> No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms
Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed if some country started banning them "for national security reasons".
> but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure
You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet. Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like the US drone companies have been lobbying a ton because they just can't compete.
Censorship, or protectionism because TikTok is eating the lunch of the big US social media?
This drives the point home:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers