I dont understand. If China does not allow foreign internet companies to operate on its soil, why should India or US or any western country allow chinese internet companies to operate within their jurisdiction ?
You aren't allowed to access many websites in the US. Many of whom went to the dark web (.onion). Many of whom are perfectly legal in other countries and even operate on the clear web in those countries.
there's gambling and sports betting and copyright violations (aka Netflix of everything for free) websites, not just CSAM thats a problem. And "visiting" makes it sound benign. Using a website you can do all sorts of stuff. Anywhere there's user created content, you can do all kinds of illegal things and break all sorts of laws. Send death threats, drug deals, money laundering.
IANAL but many sites that sell illegal drugs can get you in serious trouble. And I'm pretty sure the same goes for terrorism related searches and even searching for illegal downloads.
Trade restrictions are usually levied reciprocally, and trade agreements made to enforce equal market access or even outcomes. (E.g. you can sell Japanese cars in the US if Japan makes those cars with US steel ).
>Free access to the entire internet is a right Americans have always enjoyed.
Unless you're freeloading off of public and open wifi networks, every single person in America is paying someone (who reserves the right to refuse service to anyone) for the privilege of accessing the internet.
Unless you're freeloading off of public or open wifi networks, you are paying someone for the privilege to access the internet on their terms. The US government couldn't care less one way or another whether you have internet.
Internet access is not a right. It could be in another century or two like how the telephone turned out, but we aren't there yet and we shouldn't speak of it as such.
We're not in the era of "the internet" anymore. It's a bunch of firewalled devolved internets that are entirely within a single corporation. For example if the US banned access to all Chinese websites I think that would be bad. However explicitly banning major Chinese companies from selling directly to US consumers with an intention to mislead them I think is beneficial.
Just pass a law of automatic recipricol action for any country. If any country bans "X category" then ban anything coming FROM that country with the same category. If China wants tiktok to operate in the US then they must allow twitter, facebook, and all of the other applications to operate within China. That's the entire point of globalism. It's not a one way street.
> Because the U.S. is not a country that censors its internet. Free access to the entire internet is a right Americans have always enjoyed.
That's total bullshit, and if you don't know it you have your head stuck in the sand. There are all kinds of things that are censored, usually for legitimate reasons.
Nothing will happen to your TikTok access if it's sold to an acceptable buyer. It's fine for the US to ban it if that doesn't happen, just like it's fine for the US to ban some Chinese company per-positioning antiaircraft missiles and tanks on US property that it happens to own.
I suggest you focus your efforts on ByteDance to encourage a sale.
China blocks the world-wide internet because it follows a totalitarian ideology. The US has a free and open internet because we're a liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy is not something you are, it is something you do.
It is the sum set of beliefs, actions, and understandings of the country that results in the state of its governance.
Freedom is not an inevitable result of "being" a democracy.
Freedom is an aggregate result of the way individuals act.
> China blocks the world-wide internet because it follows a totalitarian ideology.
What you might not have considered is that if a foreign power is able to influence your fellow citizens, those fellow citizens might be weaponized against you. Before America was a republic it was part of a monarchy and individual citizens became convinced it was worth fighting to change. That was a good change, but citizens might just as easily be convinced that maybe fast results and less bureaucracy and rules are what we need and it's worth putting a strongman into power for faster results: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-strongman-fantasy
Freedom is also the freedom to be ignorant. What happens if too many people are ignorant?
Freedom is also the freedom to do the wrong thing. What happens if too many people do the wrong thing?
Freedom is not a pure concept synonymous with "good." Freedom can bend, but it can also break.
Don’t know why it’s so difficult for some people to understand the paradox of tolerance. Allowing your media to be controlled by a foreign totalitarian adversary is a quick way to having your institutions and society undermined by them.
Yes, by me - thank you for looping that discussion back in.
It was meant to be rhetorical now - as the USSR did not have TV or radio stations in the US (but, yes, you could get USSR newspapers). Differentiating between different "attack vectors" isn't new.
Censoring foreign speech is also a slide towards totalitarianism...
Imagine if the U.S. banned a Chinese book series because we were concerned it would "undermine our institutions and society". Does that sound like a free country?
The problem here is that Tiktok is not merely "promoting totalitarianism", it is actively spying on it's users and sending their data to the Chinese government. Don't you think this warrants a ban?
Sure, certainly, if it's also the case that all the US apps that are actively spying on their users and selling that data to the US three letter agencies also warrant banning.
From recent reports that's apparently most, if not all, of them.
As a quick follow up query, can Chinese, UK, Australian, etc. companies buy up data on US citizens from brokers? Is that OK, it's probably for business reasons after all .. or friendly five eyes cross border mutual spying to take the stink off.
You have to look at it from a national security perspective rather than a moral one. A foreign adversary spying on your citizens is terrible. The only reason most countries dont ban US apps is either they are already friendly with the US or incapable of developing a local alternative.
I’m confused too why this issue needs to be any more complicated than this. Are there any other product categories where allow imports from a country that completely bans our exports?
Perhaps because most countries do not want to be like China ? You can apply your reasoning to almost any Chinese policy internal or external but that doesn't justify the policy.
Especially when TikTok is a known propaganda vector for China. China has weaponized TikTok in the West and it's past time to respond to what is actually a threat. There's a reason the TikTok equivalent in China is tightly controlled by the government and looks more like PBS than the cesspool foisted on the rest of the world.
In my opinion, banning foreign websites/apps is just as bad as banning foreign literature.