Hasn't China already gone halfway to that by putting up the Great Firewall and strongly funding local "copycats" of many companies that were founded and based in the US?
I'm not suggesting that what the US is planning is good! I think it's not great. But it doesn't seem to be a pre-emptive thing that's being done.
From a non-developed world viewpoint, is it even possible for China/India etc to have there companies grow to such a massive size to rival Facebook, Micrisoft etc without protecting them from multi-nationals with way more immense power and the capacity to simply buy companies?
Ala, Facebook bought Instagram. If there was no such restriction, could they not have just bought Tencent in its infancy?
Essentially ensuring that currently countries that have not developed will continually never develop.
Why should that be due to protectionism? There could be any number of reasons why the EU has so few large tech companies compared to the US. For example:
1. Costs on top of salary are more expensive in the EU (better worker's rights, more vacation, higher taxes)
2. EU has a more fragmented market than the US in terms of language, demographics, regulations, etc.
The thing is, Europe was once relevant as far as tech goes, but European hostility toward disruptive innovation undermined all that. The EU is far less willing to let a long-established but obsolete industry die out, far less willing to tell a company that it needs to adapt to new technology to stay in business, and far less willing to tell people that the world has changed. As a result, the EU is a technology backwater, and all the innovation and big business is happening elsewhere; and now that they are faced with foreign innovation the EU is doubling down with regulations that are doing nothing more than cementing the dominance of those foreign companies.
Switzerland 67.24 1 HI 1 EUR 1
Sweden 63.65 2 HI 2 EUR 2
USA 61.73 3 HI 3 NAC 1
Netherlands 61.44 4 HI 4 EUR 3
United Kingdom 61.30 5 HI 5 EUR 4
Finland 59.83 6 HI 6 EUR 5
Denmark 58.44 7 HI 7 EUR 6
Singapore 58.37 8 HI 8 SEAO 1
Germany 58.19 9 HI 9 EUR 7
Israel 57.43 10 HI 10 NAWA 1
Combined European countries have more top 100 science & technology innovation clusters (31) than the US (26) and China (18). That's using data on pages 64 and 65 of the report.
Where in Europe have you been to out of curiosity? I've been to multiple locales in Spain, France, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, and Finland – passed through Austria and Slovenia. In fairness I do not know central and eastern Europe very well.
† “The Global Innovation Index (GII) is an annual ranking of countries by their capacity for, and success in, innovation. It is published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in partnership with other organisations and institutions” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Innovation_Index
Disruptive innovation -- innovations that render entire industries obsolete, challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc. I have also been to plenty of European locales -- in France, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Norway -- and I have seen and met with plenty of people doing innovative work, but not much in the way of disruptive innovation.
So your examples are government projects that have yet to be completed? Also I fail to see how either of your examples challenges any cultural norms, and while a successful fusion reactor would render an entire industry obsolete, how does a mandate to be climate neutral do so (obsolete does not mean "we changed the law so that you are not allowed to use this technology anymore")? I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished (assuming that the American efforts to deploy practical fusion power are not finished first).
Well, would you consider the Internet to be disruptive? Guess what; that was a government project.
Libertarian capitalism isn't the only source of disruptive innovation. I'd even go so far and say that without government intervention, disruptive innovation cannot be created.
In your own example; by forcing technology to be carbon neutral, the EU forces companies to innovate out of well trodden paths and to consider new paradigms that otherwise would be worth cost. LED light technology wouldn't be where it is today without governments forcing out incandescent light bulbs.
I did not say government projects do not count, I said government projects yet to be completed do not count, because incomplete projects have not disrupted anything. The fact is that you can only identify disruptive innovations post facto -- plenty of inventions that were supposedly going to be disruptive wound up being flops that have been mostly forgotten (easy example: the zeppelin).
As I said, "I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished..."
Edit: To your other point about the EU forcing companies to innovate, the reality is that innovation cannot always be forced. The effort could simply fail to achieve its goals, or it may turn out that the technology needed to achieve those goals is not economically viable, etc. It is also possible that the innovation will not actually be disruptive, it may wind up augmenting existing industries and allowing those industries to grow by balancing their carbon emissions with e.g. some kind of carbon capture (powered by existing renewable technologies, avoiding the need for things like base load by being opportunistic with carbon capture), never actually challenging the status quo or enabling anything that would be unthinkable today.
Actually, the Linux kernel is from Europe, it is in no way disruptive (it never challenged the status quo), and GNU software that is typically used with Linux came from the USA and is also in no way disruptive.
That is not what "disruptive" means. Linux is popular, but it did not create any of the markets where it is used. Linux did not break any business models (the GPL might have, but that license is not specific to Linux, nor is Linux specific to the GPL, nor did the GPL come out of Europe). Linux did not change how we use computers in any fundamental way. I am not even sure what "innovation" the Linux kernel represents -- what about the Linux kernel, other than how it was licensed, was game changing? What is fundamentally different about Linux (specifically Linux) compared to other kernels?
I'm not sure disruptive is best attributed as to only mean market creation. Even the basic definition of the term doesn't suggest the construction of something new, but rather to undermine an existing system. And in that sense, I'd say the linux kernel did help dissolve the previous era of Unix-as-a-product market, and the industry that ran on that model (solarix, aix, hp, etc).
And while linux itself did not construct the open source market, linux + GNU did together strongly reroute the software (syadmin, dev) market towards open source models -- which of course screwed with all tooling development companies dramatically, creating the awkward divergent setup of SaaS w/ subscription vs Enterprise on-prem companies we have today (on-prem for non-enterprise mostly getting covered by OS) -- and that divergence is a pretty clear indicator that some kind of disruption occurred
It sounds like you agree with what I said: the GPL disrupted the market. Linux did not have anything to do with that and GNU was already making waves before Linux came along, and the effort to release BSD under an open source license was already underway in the late 80s. The shift you described would almost certainly have happened if Linux had never been written.
Linux is the one that won. I don’t see how things would be much different if some BSD version or another Unix won out for server market share.
I assume disruptive means the world would be different without the product.
Similarly, Git not being around wouldn’t change much practically speaking. For all we know, Git won because of Linus. Otherwise other version control were and are similar enough. Mercurial is a prime example for the nascent time period.
OTOH, GitHub changed things. Moved from Sourceforge and in some cases, some of the mailing lists/personally hosted source codes + being part of the reason some open source stopped using some of the popular but in my opinion, kitschy and lackluster bug trackers. GitHub also inspired the copy cat Gitlab project which is now itself a unicorn worth $2B or so. Yes I know Gitlab has differentiators before and even more now. It being very heavily inspired if not lifting from GitHub for parts of it is a point of GitHub’s influence, not a critique of Gitlab.
It isn’t as certain that we would have one such dominant platform like GitHub and the new runner up and alternative of Gitlab if GitHub didn’t exist.
Linux kernel powers Android making it the most used OS kernel in the world: “Android is more popular than Windows globally; it has battled Windows for the most-used rank with them switching sides, but currently has 15% more use” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... – Ergo, disruptive.
I think you are confusing "popular" with "disruptive." Linux is popular, but it did not open a new market or revolutionize an existing one. If Linux had not been written we would have used a different kernel in smart phones, likewise with our servers, our desktops, our laptops, and everything else Linux runs on.
We are on the same page here it seems. This isn’t the only case of this issue, but mixing popularity with disruption is a prime example. Another common one is the most popular product is the best because otherwise it wouldn’t be the most popular. Android and iOS vs webOS (I am incredibly bias in my love for it) or Windows Phone 7.
GDPR has slowed the deployment of privacy-preserving technologies because it was poorly thought out and is based on a lot of bad assumptions. It has also created a larger burden for running a user-facing web company in Europe, to the benefit of the very incumbent companies it was meant to target without actually changing anything about their business models.
As for the right to be forgotten, that is nothing more than an attempt to restore yesterday's status quo. The fact is that computers are very good at storing data, indexing that stored data, and finding more data to add to searchable indexes. The only reason this so-called "right" can even be enforced is that the search market is dominated by a single search engine; if that market were more competitive, something that could theoretically happen at any time (and ironically something the EU seems to want to have happen), it would quickly become impossible to actually enforce the "right." Basically this is like the "right to fly around on a broomstick" -- it is not really grounded in reality.
And let’s not forget that free speech does not exist as a practical right in the EU—a site like Facebook would have to spend inordinate amounts of money on moderation not to get closed.
This is ridiculous. Of course free speech exists as a right in the the EU. (I don't know what you want to express with the qualifier "practical". Rights are not practical, they are legal.)
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of expression.
While it's true it's much more dangerous to have an opinion that is not not mainstream in America. I respect your free speech and it's idea very much but in practice people get their lives ruined easily. Getting fired for an example, but that might be related to workers rights.
“The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Luxembourg (tied in 6th place), Finland and Germany (tied in 8th place), and Ireland”
6 out of the top 10 most free countries are in Europe according to this one index.
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed on 4 November 1950, guarantees a broad range of human rights to inhabitants of member countries of the Council of Europe, which includes almost all European nations. These rights include Article 10, which entitles all citizens to free expression. Echoing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this provides that:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include
> freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without
> interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall
> not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or
Off the top of my head, the Cato human freedom index isn't the same thing as "free speech" the OP mentioned, and while Europe I think strikes a balance very well its rights to guarantee its citizens a happy life, the US in particular is also known for having a kind of extreme position on free speech owing to the original constitution.
Google "freedom of speech in us vs europe" to see some of the differences.
These differences aren't common enough in day-to-day life to affect quality of life, but in certain controversial situations it leads to different laws being passed. I think that's what OP is getting at.
this is false, numerous EU countries have a similar rights, de juro or de facto. Exceptions and laws against hate speech do tend to be stronger.
The fact that you're making such a statement about "the EU" shows how misleading or ignorant you're being, since this is not governed by EU law for the most part.
I'd argue that most EU countries have stronger de facto rights, since peaceful protests in the capital don't tend to get beaten into submission like what happened in the Washington last june.
>On free speech, the U.S. and Europe have also gone different ways. The German minister of justice threatened Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google search back in December, telling them they needed to move faster and better to remove hateful posts that violate German law. Now the minister is proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat.
>To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable. Facebook and Twitter are private actors who could censor voluntarily under the Constitution -- indeed, their voluntary censorship would itself be protected speech.
>But the government can’t order private censorship any more than it can censor directly. That’s because U.S. constitutional tradition treats hate speech as the advocacy of racist or sexist ideas. They may be repellent, but because they count as ideas, they get full First Amendment protection.
You're missing the entire point. Germany has much less free speech yes, but it's an outlier (comes from post-WW2 laws preventing nazi speech and continued). Other EU countries have much, much less restrictions, some countries come close to the (extreme for the western world) free speech standards US has in law.
Europe and the EU are much more heterogeneous than the US. Making comparison on national laws for the EU with US is not even falsifiable, you can usually find countries on both sides. This does not apply to EU law like GDPR of course.
I think an answer based on counter factuals was expected. Such as: if Faang salaries didn’t exert a global brain drain, if non US markets allowed competitors to Faang to exist, etc etc then the landscape would be different.
If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that.
If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.
If you hobble them through protectionism, you create a vacuum which will be filled by a clone.
The clone will then have the same incentives to preserve the status quo as Google and Facebook are doing, just with different ownership.
The only way to replace Google and Facebook with something better is to identify and invest in something better - I.e. something that offers value that they can’t.
I do believe that government investment, can help with this.
I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
> If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that. If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.
I think the result would be inherently "actually" superior by virtue of being under the thumb of EU regulation to a degree that American corporations aren't. I'm not talking about technical superiority, which I don't care about. Having locally regulated technically inferior clones is preferable to the status quo.
> I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
And such laws are best enforced against local companies, not foreign companies with foreign values. That's why it's a good idea for the EU to hobble, if not outright ban, American internet companies.
You're ignoring the fact of FB, Google et al opening offices all over Germany/EU and paying ludicrous salaries to even junior devs. It is a form of resource theft IMHO.
They have the deep coffers to lure young people who otherwise might've started their own businesses. As a result, the IT and developer market is entirely fucked up here in Southern Germany. Yes, yes, "software eating the World" and all that — but the big players (US corps, mostly) are not just by buying up most of the talent but _they create unhealty expectations for the rest of the crowd_.
_"I know where to put a semicolon in JS, I expect a starting salary of €100k"_ etc.
If they actually truly know where semicolons go in JS, then they may be worth €100k. That's some deep magic, which has bitten this very, very experienced developer in the ass more than once.
Getting it right in Java or C is no special feat. Getting it 100% correct in Javascript... that's an accomplishment.
From the other point of view of having worked for US software companies all my life, I think the developer market is fucked up in the rest of the world because talented developers are getting criminally underpaid.
a) You're acting as if no one earning a good salary saves up for taking risks later.
b) How entitled can you be to tell other people that it's fucked up not to risk it all to make a business where you please, or not to request salaries the industry is willing to pay. All in the name of... what? Nationalism?
There’s Zalando in Germany, which sees itself as rival to Amazon, but nowhere as big. And I think it’s safe to say there’s no substantial competition in social networks space. Even though Telegram is registered in London, Durov is playing by the US rules.
Coolblue and Bol in the Netherlands as well. Amazon doesn't really have a big market share here.
Bol is also owned by Ahold (Albert Heijn). Which to be fair to them, is a pretty big technical powerhouse for this side of the pond. They've been developing self-checkout systems since the 80's.
Stop the purchase many if not most thought was an overpay by a company that was still possibly a fad? Facebook fully opened to the public in 2009. IG was bought in 2012 as an iPhone only app. No web app, no android app. iPhones were not a big market at the time.
Edit: I don’t recall now. The android app may have been in public beta or just released at the time.
There's a spectrum of "protection". What China does (and the Trump administration proposes, sorta, with its application-level bans) isn't to merely "protect" it's local companies, it's to entirely ban content from global competitors.
The problem isn't that Baidu search was "protected" while developing, it's that a Chinese citizen cannot do a search on Google at all. Or follow someone on Twitter. Or join a Facebook group. Anything you might show to the "public" on any of these sites is invisible in China.
Rocket Internet, an old-ish tech company in Europe, makes its living off cloning And localizing US startup ideas before the US equivalent makes it to Europe. They’ve been doing it for years now.
I guess the diff is that Europe is still an open market as opposed to China.
Making clones is not a material part of this equation. It happens everywhere.
But when a nation puts up barriers to trade, and grabs IP, then the government themselves back companies, using control of their nationalised banks and central bank - then it takes on a different form entirely.
Why should it matter whether China does it, in the decision of whether any other countries should do it? I thought we are supposed to support liberal values even when times get tough.
Also, the idea that times are tough for the US when it has the largest GDP it ever had, a consistent share of the US economy (which has been stable for the last many decades) and bigger and richer companies than ever is kind of laughable.
Yes, lately the US has struggled to distribute that wealth domestically. But that’s not Chinas fault and scapegoating them Will not fox that problem.
It is pre-emptive since the danger of Chinese apps is still hypothetical (and cyber attacks are way more relevant to national security than consumer apps anyway).
Consider it economic protectionism; not national security. China will not let western companies succeed and compete fairly. Thus, companies with access to both Chinese and USA markets (ie those from China) have a huge advantage.
So Facebook and google are unblocked now? Reddit? Quora? The internet situation isn’t getting better, if anything it is getting worse: China keeps improving their anti-VPN tech and the GFW is bound to include Hong Kong in the near future.
Sure. The new new part here is that the US has come around to the chinese point of view, to some extent... and for much of the same reasons.
Deng Xiaping's famous line during the chinese market reform era was "If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in."
The "fresh air" was a market economy, trade with western economies, even cultural liberalisation... as long as they weren't dangerous to the regime. They were still dubious of ideological capitalism, at its height in the 80s & 90s... but willing to compromise. They weren't willing to compromise on free press, speech, association, etc.. Those are the flies. They were not about to let them in.
The ccp felt entirely vindicated when the USSR collapsed, and doubly so by the 90s, when China's economy was obviously booming. Communist economics could be binned while maintaining chinese communism in all other realms. Liberal ideologists were wrong.
Anyway... by the time the www got big, this new version of chinese communism was mature, successful and confident. Google, wikipedia, later facebook... these are politically potent, and dangerous. The internet would influence political opinions. It would be exploited by foreign intelligence. It would harbour dissent, and dissent would grow into revolt... the ccp had no control of it. Besides politics, there were other issues. Economics, of course. Why not reserve these markets for chinese companies? Information security, espionage and other intelligence adjacent issues.
The ccp were correct on all points and the last decades proved it. The arab spring. Many elections worldwide, notably the 2016 US presidential. Prism. Flat earthers. $trn market caps. The ticktok backlash. All proof that Deng was right. Political potency. Intelligence potency. Economic potency. All too potent to stay hands off.
Back to the US... The US has basically come around to all these positions. Regardless of why Zuck is called to testify in congress, congressmen are most interested in political potency. Are you favouring my opponent's party more than mine? Is foreign intelligence operating on your platform?
US intelligence treats domestic internet companies as an asset, and foreign ones as adversaries. There isn't even much veneer anymore.
The economics also play, of course. It gets danced around for narrative/ideological reasons... but it's foolish to think the US would be neutral about Amazon's success vis a vis Alibaba.
In essence, the Dengist position has been adopted in the US. The internet americans access must be american controlled. Political reasons first. Intelligence reasons second. Economic reasons quitely.
> The ccp were correct on all points and the last decades proved it. .. The arab spring. Many elections worldwide, notably the 2016 US presidential. Prism. Flat earthers.
In the short term this might be true. But any view that holds non-democratic authoritarianism up as a superior long-term approach has to grapple with the fact that open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century. This is in the face of world war, revolutions, and developments in communications technology that destabilized entire political movements.
Protests and electoral chaos are bad things, and new communications technologies can make them more destabilizing. But the ability to peacefully avoid something like 25 years of Maoism is worth an immeasurable amount of short-term chaos. We should be a little bit careful before we copy the Chinese approach.
But the current leadership may be happy with performing at 75% of open societies if they still get to run things: enough development to keep the outsiders at bay, not enough openness to cause trouble.
As long as their general rising prosperity, it may be good enough for most folks in China as well:
> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
> China’s betrayal at Versailles did not help the cause of liberalism in China. After all, it was the standard bearers of liberalism — the U.K., France, and the United States — that had negotiated secret treaties to give Shandong to the Japanese.
> Former liberals gravitated toward two main camps, both overtly Leninist in organization, both unapologetically authoritarian: the Nationalists and the Communists. By the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals believed that an authoritarian solution was China’s only recourse.
I didn't say "superior," and I don't mean it. I also don't mean that the US should copy China, only that it is.. kinda.
I do, however, think the view that "open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century" is potentially naive, dangerous even. Did the 18th and 19th century "prove" that expansionist imperialism is superior to nationalism, democratic liberalism, etc?
We have a tendency to narrate history with cause-effect dynamics that compliment our ideals. If you believe in open society (I do), you tend to make this an anchor in your historical worldview.
In any case... the west, especially the US, is what "outperformed." If Roosevelt had been Russian & Lenin American, I don't think the 20th century would have played out the same but backwards. There are too many factors at play. History is not determined by ideological positions.
Post WWII, western european states certainly did outperform warsaw pact states. I think that's the strongest evidence of "superiority," but again there are many factors. Not least among them, Western germany traded within a much wealthier trade block. A similar dynamic affected China in the 80s. They suddenly had access to wealthy western markets. This creates wealth regardless of governing economic systems.
In my view, the political imperative is backwards. Open society must succeed for open society ideals to prevail. This as opposed to "success is important, therefore open societies ideas must be adopted." There is no ideological position that guarantees success. That is itself a communist perspective... messianic rationalism.
I don't believe history to be deterministic. Open societies are valuable for their own sake. How they perform is, IMO, attributable to "execution" above all else.
Do you even speak Mandarin, to begin with? Chinese segment was a normal part of the Internet till the second half of 2000s. Baidu in particular was a competitive search engine, and another dotcom crash survivor, along with Yandex, Google, Yahoo etc.
If we re talking about the chinese-speaking internet then what's the point of talking about "splitting"? Splitting implies that international users used it, and now don't.
It makes more sense to use splitting to refer to access, rather than use. No group anywhere uses all of the www, but in the past all groups at least had the option of doing so.
Edit: it was probably a much more significant change from the Chinese point of view than the Western one, since propertionally more Chinese speak English and browse English sites than Westerners speak Mandarin and browse Chinese sites.
Most country have this sort of control, there will be censorship at some level.
Also, China did not ban US companies, but requires all foreign companies abide Chinese laws when operate in China. Apple have setup their data centre in China, iCloud is not banned. Similar story to Bing search, AWS, Azure etc..
There are only a handful of countries that restrict internet access: China, Lydia, Egypt, Myanmar, Russia, maybe a few others. All authoritarian regimes to some extent.
> China did not ban US companies
Blocking domains via a countrywide firewall is as close as you get to “banning”. If it was about following laws you’d enforce that through legal means like everyone else, and not brute force.
> There are only a handful of countries that restrict internet access
I agree with the thrust of your general argument, but feel it necessary to point out that the list of countries with substantial and automatic filtering mechanisms is much larger than that. Eg, I've experienced censorship in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
Legal means can still involve brute force; for example, when a court somewhere decides that a certain type of content is abhorrent and should be put on an automatic DNS blacklist that ISPs are required to use.
Over the years I've come to believe that an overwhelming amount of people would actually prefer a censored internet. Some might want "obscene" material gone, others would love to eradicate "fake news" and a few people might still be around that would instantly jump at any chance to purge the internet of blasphemy against their sky-daddy of choice.
I used to think censorship was really just an instrument of the few to control the masses, but I'm starting to believe that we who just don't want a censored internet are the minority.
I support the tiktok ban because it’s about economic fairness. American tech companies can’t fairly compete in China. But until now, Chinese tech companies _can_. This gives inherent advantages to Chinese tech companies.
When understanding the government never look at what they say only look at what they do.
They say it's about the Chinese invading privacy and giving them selves an unfair advantage.
They could act like it and promote American encrypted chat apps like Signal but they fund the NSA to undercut American tech, encryption and privacy apps like Signal and resort to the same tyranny as china, the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent.
It was never about the Chinese it was always about justifying their current tyranny.
China doesn’t have rule of law. They have rule by law, but that’s quite different: as long as google or Facebook can’t impress the official class, the officials will find a law to keep them out. They can’t actually go to court and dispute the decision (which doesn’t officially exist anyways), and I’m sure Tiktok and Tencent are going to court over this (and they even have a good chance of even winning).
Let’s put it this way: the Chinese Constitution makes strong guarantees about freedom of speech and press. But it doesn’t matter since there is no court to enforce any of that, China lacks any checks and balances and officials mostly rule by fiat and hierarchy.
That's what they're saying to justify it. That and the evergreen appeal to "security reasons". But these are the same people who, every few years, try to ban strong encryption. The next time they bring that up — which you'd better believe they will immediately the next time the right news story presents itself — they're going to use this as precedent. "See, we've been banning technology for all these reasons, what's one more little step? It's for national security."
It's a complicated situation in this case. My comment was more about censoring the internet in general, as that seems to be the more important part, with the individual case being more of an excuse to address this issue yet again.
I mostly think the tiktok ban is justified, for one because china has been playing unfair for ages now and because it is a national security problem when the chinese government could, at any moment, give itself access to this much information that could be used to blackmail large numbers of people.
You're absolutely right. Just think what havok China could wreak, with access to all those millions of duck-pouting orange-faced selfies and stultifyingly illiterate vacuous conversations, conducted entirely through the medium of txt spk and emojis.
Forget economics or national security in the traditional sense of data privacy or anything like that.
We can not have a major social network that is algorithmically driven controlled by a hostile foreign power. Full stop. Imagine if this were 40 years ago and tiktok was owned by the Soviets. Completely absurd.
This. I also am old enough to remember when people were upset at the web giants replacing the old decentralized internet- "what will happen if one day they'll start censoring stuff?". And now all you hear is people getting mad at internet giants because they don't censor enough.
Internet habits also changed from an active research to eating from the table that someone prepared for you. Even if you do active research now, you inevitably end up on prepared and diversity-mixed pages. Crowd and free write access spoil everything, not platforms themselves. In a sense, the old internet had less free speech, as you couldn't do off-topic and not be fined.
>>Some might want "obscene" material gone, others would love to eradicate "fake news" and a few people might still be around that would instantly jump at any chance to purge the internet of blasphemy against their sky-daddy of choice.
It worked exactly like that before. It is our nature. We want to believe in different/opposite things and we are fine with chatting on opposite topics without going to do a real harm.
That's psychology of escape, like an evening boxing or walking alone makes you calmer at the morning. You cannot make everyone happy in a single overpopulated diverse group, because it is much easier to fall into -isms and blow off the steam at the world instead of doing that at your gym. Free speech in www is basically moot.
We already had that with AOL. You could still access the regular internet but at the time a lot of people stayed around the AOL homepage and AOL sites. It was great for older people and children.
Well said. I once heard it described that, as a parent, having a home with open access to the Internet is like unscrewing the hinges and removing the door to your child’s bedroom, removing the front door to the house, and leaving the lights on all night.
> I don’t want racists to have free reign on Facebook
And who says they should?
1. You can just argue against them, that's how free speech ideally works.
2. Being technically allowed to say anything online does not and should not imply any legal immunity. Beyond that, if they're not committing any crimes, racists are allowed to express their opinions online, whether we like it or not.
3. Facebook, so long as they admit they're not a neutral platform, are allowed to enforce their own community guidelines. If they, without government intervention decide to ban racists, that's on them. Unless the government prevents you from building an alternative service, of course.
I have jet to see any politician voluntarily give away power.
It's good thing that more than just the US presidency is up for grabs in November then! To those who can vote in that election, find out where your potential legislative representatives stand on issues related to executive power. They have the ability to limit it, whether the president volunteers or not.
The world is a scary place I think a lot of people would accept prison openly if it gave them freedom from their responsibility and safety from the real world. I see this constantly every where people will stick with an abusive partner because of fear they will find no one better. Trump will win the election because people are scared of corona and
will want to support the status quo or normalcy no matter what the normalcy is.
I just wonder if the source of the problem are these "App stores" of the world.
If I could just download these apps like I download software for linux, it would be very difficult for the govt to enforce anything like this.
Tik-tok banned in India too and by ban it merely meant that the govt. forced Google / Apple to remove it from the play store. There is complete ban on torrent / porn sites in India but that doesn't stop anyone from visiting those either.
I think this is just one more argument against these central repos that are aiding censorship and political propagandas.
I think you are right that "app stores" are the most convenient place to enforce this. They get a fairly good effectiveness with low effort.
However I doubt that not having them would stop the bans, it would take a bit more motivation, and a lot more effort but unless we have a truly censor-resistant solution I suspect the government would still put in the effort.
History showed us that governments are lazy and will go after the biggest fish and tons of small actors will evade the gov ban. So I believe no app store (or allow sideloading) is better for the peoples
> There is complete ban on torrent / porn sites in India
This is incorrect. There are a set of sites which a few judges decided should be banned. There is no ban based on the category of the sites, or in other words newer sites based on these categories are not automatically banned.
I agree in a philosophical sense, but I’m not sure how a separate method of distribution would affect this particular situation. Unless the argument is just against gatekeepers in general, like the state.
I would say it's that any centralised code signing source will inevitably be unleashed in a geopolitical fight at some point, and setting them up in the name of security should always bear that in mind.
The difference is that money is a source of control for it and is needed for fiscal transactions which are readily regulated compared to data exchange. It is far easier to send a Gigabyte of IP packets to North Korea than to send 25 cents.
Bitcoin and others dreamed of it for currency but it has failed for several reasons.
Governments and companies are going to be spying on everybody either way thanks to technology.
If asked, given the current state of these two entities, I would choose being spied on by the US government 100 out of 100 times over being spied on by the Chinese government.
As a Canadian, and one employed by a US HQ'd company, the US gov't has the power to mess with my life in more ways than the Chinese government does. So, no, if forced to I don't accept your choice. You might prefer being spied on by your own gov't, but I don't accept your gov't spying on me.
I'm not going to China any time soon, but I need to cross the border to the US for work sometimes, and for pleasure sometimes, too. Since 9/11 that border has been an aggressive and hostile place marked by frequent highly authoritarian interventions and it has escalated even more under Trump. And its reach extends now onto our phones and thus into our private lives and this spying now extends online and profiles are being made of all sorts of people without them knowing. This has always happened, but its reach is far wider than before.
Being flagged by the US gov't hurts me directly, China only indirectly. I don't trust the US federal regime, and neither should (most) Americans.
EDIT: love being downvoted along with the other (European) comment. It's clear many Americans still don't get how their government behaves to its so-called allies. Ask Angela Merkel how she felt about having her phone tapped. Maybe the EU and other allies need to start randomly detaining US citizens with "strange names" or "suspicious profiles" and keeping them in rooms for hours, interrogate them, search their phones, then let them go with a smirk and a "have a nice day." Maybe then US citizens will understand how odious this is.
On the other hand, the Chinese have virtually no pull here, while the US has massive reach in Europe, including "cooperation" for all kinds of CIA operations, black sites etc. That's not because "we're friends", that because the provinces do what the empire commands. They'll issue a press release about being disgusted later though.
What I'm trying to say: it's better to be spied on by somebody that can't kidnap you. The Chinese can't really kidnap you in Europe, the US very much can.
And of course, the third option is preferred: don't be spied on by the US OR China, at least not to that degree. But that would require European Data Sovereignty, and that'll likely not go over well with the US, which is why the EU won't try.
I would say there's a very wide range of ages and experience there, but practically nobody is even 70 years old.
However it is true that the EU as a whole doesn't really care that much about an overall digital strategy and would probably leave that up to each individual country - how they would react if e.g. Italy started aggressively protecting its home grown tech I'm not sure.
and us congress is much younger? europe does pretty well. they work on customer rights like privacy and legal returns period. startups don't take off because of lack of funding and that they are easily bought out by american big tech
The bans will be blocked by courts and the administration knows that. It pushes the orders forward anyways for purpose of political communication.
It is not in the US strategic interest to "balkanise" the internet; as it is now the US has enormous influence over the global internet. Why replace that with something much smaller?
"Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks."
Looks like the goal isn't to balkanise the global internet. Rather, to create a zone where Chinese companies are banned from accessing it at all by integrating other countries into the Clean Netwok program starting with the US. Unlike China's great firewall which is purely domestic in scope, the Clean Network has global ambitions.
If it is indeed blocked by courts, this would validate those of us who do not believe that this action should happen, in the way that it does, in a free, open and rules-based democracy.
It would shame all those, including those SV thought leaders, who defend the US now engaging in the practice of "banning apps" based on short-sighted opportunism and "what about them" arguments, with now regard to fundamental principals we are supposed to stand for.
Will it be blocked by the courts? I find this ban detestable but from what I’ve read Trump has plenty of avenues from which he can pursue this ban, thanks to Congress slowly giving more and more power to the President.
I don't know.. it seems like just another country adding restrictions like most countries have.
The idea of an open internet doesn't really work when you have countries that are not abiding by the "rules" like China that censor and utilize every chance they have to monitor user activity.
It is a sign not that the US is splitting the internet, but that work towards decentralizing stuff and evolve the web in such a way that it cannot be censored should be implemented.
Of course, countries can always "cut the cable" but that is too much of an economic hit I believe.
What's to stop Chinese agents doing what the NSA does to spy on Americans?
I think it would be better to just let china spy on the 12 year olds that use tictok and encourage Americans to use strong encryption / security by default.
Following the Chinese lead of censorship just encourages them to hack American companies like the Americans do.
That's a ton of kompromat. Even if irrelevant on average and on the whole, it'll impact enough individuals. Why give that kind of leverage away for free?
Though agreed regardless, we need to move towards E2E encryption, local storage, and local key management (i.e. no password resets... or complex recovery schemes).
There is an easy solution to kompromat - stop being judgemental shitheads for 12 year olds or caring what morons think. Seriously - kompromat is defined in terms of tbe cultural norms and not intrinsic. The LGBT community learned this well before the fucking CIA by being out and proud to tell the mafia blackmailers to go fuck themselves.
Setting up shop in the US or Europe implies having agents in US or Europe, and those people could be spied on by the US/Europe, or coerced or just shut down. It's a more all-in strategy.
If you want to avoid foreign "misinformation" (spin that as you will), this is the only sensible thing to do. Arguably, the citizens of the "free" world are incredibly vulnerable to misinformation campaigns run by foreign agents.
All people are vulnerable to misinformation campaigns, the problem is every one has lost interest in accurate information. The only solution people provide is that we need to get rid of the bad information instead of changing peoples motives.
I hope this is satire. Every totalitarian government says that censorship is for the people's protection. Then the government gets to decide what is or isn't misinformation.
A population with good critical thinking skills is necessary in a democracy. Conversely if you don't give people the right to vote for their leaders or policies, you don't need them to think critically (or politically) either.
> Every totalitarian government says that censorship is for the people's protection.
Because this is the messaging the people will accept, a dictator could just say that's the way it is deal with it but they don't, they use the narrative the people will accept.
> Then the government gets to decide what is or isn't misinformation.
>> The only solution people provide is that we need to get rid of the bad information
There is no "the government" its just people, two factions the red flag and the blue flag both get their information from their own isolated sources of what is accurate. The truth is somewhere in the middle ground with both sides deciding that whatever doesn't fit their current clic is misinformation. Democracy is great at giving us two flags instead of one but I don't really give a fuck about flags I care about individual freedom.
> A population with good critical thinking skills is necessary in a democracy.
100% and I feel our democracy is failing because people are just not motivated toward critical thinking, its difficult and calls yourself into question, what if you are wrong? or supported something you no longer believe in? in a world with cancel culture and mob justice? Fascism is a low effort alternative for many. Simple problem: all the other flag wavers, simple solution: get rid of them.
If democratic countries want to remain that way we need to give up our tyranny and flag waving in support of real freedom. People won't do it naturally we need to change the system to encourage people to think by rewarding them for doing so. Change peoples motives toward critical thinking and democracy and away from fascism and tyranny.
>>Mr Pompeo's reasons for "cleaning" the US network of Chinese companies is very different to authoritarian government's desire to control what is said online.
Good to see the BBC [AKA Radio Free America] continuing to uphold its [mostly self-awarded] reputation for unbiased reporting.
PS: in the above context, it should be: authoritarian governments'
These days, the standard of literacy ain't much to write home about either.
Sure France and other countries block domains, in US DOJ just takes them ower (the domains).
Most countries will, if push comes to show, find a way to "block" something they don't like and think they can politically get away with.
And I think that there is a good reason for ability for doing that to be there. Some countries will abuse that however.
The problem here isn't any one person circumventing the 'censorship', it's influencing mass movements to prevent mass data-grabbing. If every tech-savvy Linux user uses TikTok, it's probably not that big of a deal as it's less than one percent of the population (and arguably the group most well-equipped to deal with the potential spying).
Part of me thinks this is good. Not for others, but for me at least. After all, if you can censor 98% of users by focussin on apps, why would you bother implementing technology to censor the lower levels of the internet? Who knows, we might even reach a point where new censorship mechanisms won't even bother with "low-level" traffic like HTTP(S) anymore.
More naive than hoping that there won't be any authoritarian censoring in the first place? Not by much, I'd say, but maybe I'm just being very pessimistic. Honestly I'm just kinda disillusioned. I know most people would gladly go along with this kind of BS and the rest of us would just get dragged along, as has happened countless times already. (Or do you really think we're in a better position now than east Germany was right after whitnessing the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship?)
Requiring certain walled gardens to not publish certain apps is a form of censorship. But it's not exactly "splitting the Internet." Everything's still connected together, it's just that certain sites aren't allowed to host certain material.
I have a few questions. Would this apply only to Apple and Google app stores? Would jailbroken phones still legally be able to install the apps? Would third-party app stores legally be able to distribute them?
If the government tells an app store not to sell a specific program, isn't that similar to telling a bookstore not to sell a specific book? How does the government argue that the free speech protections of the Constitution don't apply?
I'm not sure what you mean, beside the overall technological progress. If so this is why I'm stumped by the recent international degradation. I'd hoped sanity would be stronger but actually the modern world may not be a lot stabler than previous centuries. Or at least not a lot wiser.
The internet would be split if the simplest requests -- TCP, HTTP, and email -- cannot cross borders without inspection/censorship. If people everywhere cannot communicate, we would move toward the stark borders of the Cold War, where simple acts of cross-border communication were notable.
One can readily argue that China has already split the internet, to an extent. In the best case, one can imagine that the US is stumbling-toward/leading-the-way into a world where free expression and freedom from monitoring is requisite for unfettered access to the predominant global communications network. I hope that is the ultimate destination.
The Trump administration is unlikely to be able to finish that work, but a line in the sand to state that outright monitoring of global citizens is unacceptable seems like a good place to start. To make this work, the United States must also refrain from deeply monitoring the speech and actions of citizens of other countries. It is reasonable to expect the EU to require local hosting of a lot more US cloud services in the coming year.
If the world is to balkanize, it may also mean that cross-border interactions are dominated by open-source software and open protocols. A silver lining in a dark cloud.
Please don't derail the discussion by talking about apps.
This is not just about TikTok or other apps, and not just about app stores. As the title says, it's about whether we will have open networks in the future.
"Clean Carrier: To ensure untrusted People’s Republic of China (PRC) carriers are not connected with U.S. telecommunications networks. Such companies pose a danger to U.S. national security and should not provide international telecommunications services to and from the United States."
> Do you think the US administration has enough integrity to be trusted with such matters?
If they are doing it as a direct response to China, then yes. If China decides to start playing nicely, then we will roll it back.
We act in response to how they conduct themselves. China is like a child. If they behave, we play toys with them. If they misbehave, we put them in timeout
It's not just the US. Countries around the world are slowly coming to the realization that they can really only regulate the portions of the internet housed within their legal jurisdictions, and that data sovereignty matters.
Is the US splitting the internet? That's debatable. I think we started the process with the Patriot Act. That led to multiple countries passing new privacy and data localization laws (GDPR in Europe, Data Localization in Russia). I believe that the current proposals coming out of State are best characterized as a (clumsy) attempt at data localization through executive fiat.
Of course, this could also just be revenge for a bunch of TikTok users trolling the president pretty hard.
as much as i'm afraid of internet balkanization, this is alarmist - noone is proposing blocking all traffic to china, they are proposing blocking individual foreign organizations suspected of criminal activity, which is already what has been happening and what happens in every other sphere.
With GDPR, Great Firewall, Apple and Facebook's heavy handed gardens... Most of the internet is splintered.
I don't have the legal team to negotiate GDPR, so I can't make my website legal in Europe (it probably is, I collect practically nothing, but I can't be sure since IANAL.
I don't have an apple product, so my app can't be tested or converted to work in Apple devices and put in their App store.. so if you like what I made, and you don't have an Android device, you can't use it on mobile...
If you want to use my web interface, if it's Chromium, you now need to go through an extra step to unblock cookies to jump from one of my sites to another, because the subdomain changes and that's "a different website" now..
Seems like everyone is already splintering the Internet... Most of it is the US's fault, but it's not just TikTok..
The internet is the new TV. It stopped being a paradise for freedoms and ideas once it became popular and commercial. It’s rife with propaganda, politics, conspiracy theories, scams, advertising, and generally speaking average or below average content. The question is what is the next form of communication we can create or where can we take refuge from all this noise, until that becomes average. All guns are on the US because of the political situation but the internet in various countries is already censored or even more aggressively regulated. For those of us who want a free medium we need to create a new medium. Ideally not one where freedom means hate speech or dubious conspiracies, but one where, as the internet was in its original form, borders and censorship dont exist.
The alternative network, what we have, is dirty, soiled, unhealthy, blemished - because of Chinese influence. By removing China from the connection, the network is cleansed.
It's transparently racist. It is not necessary to use words like this if you have a persuasive argument based upon facts. This is an appeal to ignorance and fear of things that are filthy.
This would of been a great opportunity for Apple to crack down on abusive API calls to ensure far less spying on mobile apps. The issues with TikTok are basically only working so long as the OS allows them to continue to occur. Mobile apps should be significantly more transparent whenver they do more than just show something on a screen. If they access the network, your location, etc it should be logged somewhere, and you should always be able to go into the app settings (even if it's hidden for "advanced users") and block apps from accessing specified API calls completely.
Not sure if Google will do it, or if they do, they might take their sweet time.
More than preventing access, OSes should allow spoofing information just to make it harder for apps to be like "but I want want waaaaant your GPS coordinates or I won't let you use this calculator app"
I'm not suggesting that what the US is planning is good! I think it's not great. But it doesn't seem to be a pre-emptive thing that's being done.
Ala, Facebook bought Instagram. If there was no such restriction, could they not have just bought Tencent in its infancy?
Essentially ensuring that currently countries that have not developed will continually never develop.
1. Costs on top of salary are more expensive in the EU (better worker's rights, more vacation, higher taxes)
2. EU has a more fragmented market than the US in terms of language, demographics, regulations, etc.
These don't necessarily apply to China or India.
Combined European countries have more top 100 science & technology innovation clusters (31) than the US (26) and China (18). That's using data on pages 64 and 65 of the report.
Where in Europe have you been to out of curiosity? I've been to multiple locales in Spain, France, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, and Finland – passed through Austria and Slovenia. In fairness I do not know central and eastern Europe very well.
† “The Global Innovation Index (GII) is an annual ranking of countries by their capacity for, and success in, innovation. It is published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in partnership with other organisations and institutions” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Innovation_Index
The first full scale fusion reactor: https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines
Europe is striving to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
Both of those projects/initiatives “render entire industries obsolete” and “challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc.”
Libertarian capitalism isn't the only source of disruptive innovation. I'd even go so far and say that without government intervention, disruptive innovation cannot be created. In your own example; by forcing technology to be carbon neutral, the EU forces companies to innovate out of well trodden paths and to consider new paradigms that otherwise would be worth cost. LED light technology wouldn't be where it is today without governments forcing out incandescent light bulbs.
As I said, "I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished..."
Edit: To your other point about the EU forcing companies to innovate, the reality is that innovation cannot always be forced. The effort could simply fail to achieve its goals, or it may turn out that the technology needed to achieve those goals is not economically viable, etc. It is also possible that the innovation will not actually be disruptive, it may wind up augmenting existing industries and allowing those industries to grow by balancing their carbon emissions with e.g. some kind of carbon capture (powered by existing renewable technologies, avoiding the need for things like base load by being opportunistic with carbon capture), never actually challenging the status quo or enabling anything that would be unthinkable today.
It was incredibly disruptive, and continues to be so where 90% of servers runs off of it and almost all embedded systems use it.
Are you just trying to troll, or are you trying to rewrite history?
And while linux itself did not construct the open source market, linux + GNU did together strongly reroute the software (syadmin, dev) market towards open source models -- which of course screwed with all tooling development companies dramatically, creating the awkward divergent setup of SaaS w/ subscription vs Enterprise on-prem companies we have today (on-prem for non-enterprise mostly getting covered by OS) -- and that divergence is a pretty clear indicator that some kind of disruption occurred
I assume disruptive means the world would be different without the product.
Similarly, Git not being around wouldn’t change much practically speaking. For all we know, Git won because of Linus. Otherwise other version control were and are similar enough. Mercurial is a prime example for the nascent time period.
OTOH, GitHub changed things. Moved from Sourceforge and in some cases, some of the mailing lists/personally hosted source codes + being part of the reason some open source stopped using some of the popular but in my opinion, kitschy and lackluster bug trackers. GitHub also inspired the copy cat Gitlab project which is now itself a unicorn worth $2B or so. Yes I know Gitlab has differentiators before and even more now. It being very heavily inspired if not lifting from GitHub for parts of it is a point of GitHub’s influence, not a critique of Gitlab.
It isn’t as certain that we would have one such dominant platform like GitHub and the new runner up and alternative of Gitlab if GitHub didn’t exist.
> GitHub is the one that won. I don’t see how things would be much different if some GitLab version or another SourceForge won out that market share.
[Where and how people spend their money is the best way of measuring what people really think].
1. The right to be forgotten, which tries to turn back the clock to an earlier age when search engines did not exist.
2. Copyright extremism (yes, there are places where it is worse than the USA) e.g. the EU copright directive.
3. Photography rules, which, unlike the USA, restrict the use of cameras in public and may render selfies illegal in some cases.
4. GDPR
GDPR is fantastic and is forward-thinking.
As for the right to be forgotten, that is nothing more than an attempt to restore yesterday's status quo. The fact is that computers are very good at storing data, indexing that stored data, and finding more data to add to searchable indexes. The only reason this so-called "right" can even be enforced is that the search market is dominated by a single search engine; if that market were more competitive, something that could theoretically happen at any time (and ironically something the EU seems to want to have happen), it would quickly become impossible to actually enforce the "right." Basically this is like the "right to fly around on a broomstick" -- it is not really grounded in reality.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of expression.
“The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Luxembourg (tied in 6th place), Finland and Germany (tied in 8th place), and Ireland”
6 out of the top 10 most free countries are in Europe according to this one index.
"2020 World Press Freedom Index" https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
7 out the top 10 most free countries in the world for press freedoms are in Europe.edit: for those downvoting me for speaking the truth, why are you doing it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed on 4 November 1950, guarantees a broad range of human rights to inhabitants of member countries of the Council of Europe, which includes almost all European nations. These rights include Article 10, which entitles all citizens to free expression. Echoing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this provides that:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include
> freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without
> interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall
> not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or
> cinema enterprises.
Google "freedom of speech in us vs europe" to see some of the differences.
These differences aren't common enough in day-to-day life to affect quality of life, but in certain controversial situations it leads to different laws being passed. I think that's what OP is getting at.
The fact that you're making such a statement about "the EU" shows how misleading or ignorant you're being, since this is not governed by EU law for the most part.
I'd argue that most EU countries have stronger de facto rights, since peaceful protests in the capital don't tend to get beaten into submission like what happened in the Washington last june.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-s...
>On free speech, the U.S. and Europe have also gone different ways. The German minister of justice threatened Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google search back in December, telling them they needed to move faster and better to remove hateful posts that violate German law. Now the minister is proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat.
>To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable. Facebook and Twitter are private actors who could censor voluntarily under the Constitution -- indeed, their voluntary censorship would itself be protected speech.
>But the government can’t order private censorship any more than it can censor directly. That’s because U.S. constitutional tradition treats hate speech as the advocacy of racist or sexist ideas. They may be repellent, but because they count as ideas, they get full First Amendment protection.
Europe and the EU are much more heterogeneous than the US. Making comparison on national laws for the EU with US is not even falsifiable, you can usually find countries on both sides. This does not apply to EU law like GDPR of course.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yello...
I find your answer rather shallow.
Well, all except shareholders of those companies.
We need something better. Hobbling them won’t achieve that.
If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that.
If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.
If you hobble them through protectionism, you create a vacuum which will be filled by a clone.
The clone will then have the same incentives to preserve the status quo as Google and Facebook are doing, just with different ownership.
The only way to replace Google and Facebook with something better is to identify and invest in something better - I.e. something that offers value that they can’t.
I do believe that government investment, can help with this.
I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
I think the result would be inherently "actually" superior by virtue of being under the thumb of EU regulation to a degree that American corporations aren't. I'm not talking about technical superiority, which I don't care about. Having locally regulated technically inferior clones is preferable to the status quo.
> I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
And such laws are best enforced against local companies, not foreign companies with foreign values. That's why it's a good idea for the EU to hobble, if not outright ban, American internet companies.
What kinds of regulation on social networking and or search would produce a better product?
They have the deep coffers to lure young people who otherwise might've started their own businesses. As a result, the IT and developer market is entirely fucked up here in Southern Germany. Yes, yes, "software eating the World" and all that — but the big players (US corps, mostly) are not just by buying up most of the talent but _they create unhealty expectations for the rest of the crowd_.
_"I know where to put a semicolon in JS, I expect a starting salary of €100k"_ etc.
Getting it right in Java or C is no special feat. Getting it 100% correct in Javascript... that's an accomplishment.
b) How entitled can you be to tell other people that it's fucked up not to risk it all to make a business where you please, or not to request salaries the industry is willing to pay. All in the name of... what? Nationalism?
Bol is also owned by Ahold (Albert Heijn). Which to be fair to them, is a pretty big technical powerhouse for this side of the pond. They've been developing self-checkout systems since the 80's.
Edit: I don’t recall now. The android app may have been in public beta or just released at the time.
That's sort of a strawman though.
There's a spectrum of "protection". What China does (and the Trump administration proposes, sorta, with its application-level bans) isn't to merely "protect" it's local companies, it's to entirely ban content from global competitors.
The problem isn't that Baidu search was "protected" while developing, it's that a Chinese citizen cannot do a search on Google at all. Or follow someone on Twitter. Or join a Facebook group. Anything you might show to the "public" on any of these sites is invisible in China.
That is the problem. Not "protection" per se.
I guess the diff is that Europe is still an open market as opposed to China.
But when a nation puts up barriers to trade, and grabs IP, then the government themselves back companies, using control of their nationalised banks and central bank - then it takes on a different form entirely.
Everything happening is a bit predictable.
Yes, lately the US has struggled to distribute that wealth domestically. But that’s not Chinas fault and scapegoating them Will not fox that problem.
And the idea that jobs that were formerly done in the US have not been exported to China is ludicrous.
Deng Xiaping's famous line during the chinese market reform era was "If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in."
The "fresh air" was a market economy, trade with western economies, even cultural liberalisation... as long as they weren't dangerous to the regime. They were still dubious of ideological capitalism, at its height in the 80s & 90s... but willing to compromise. They weren't willing to compromise on free press, speech, association, etc.. Those are the flies. They were not about to let them in.
The ccp felt entirely vindicated when the USSR collapsed, and doubly so by the 90s, when China's economy was obviously booming. Communist economics could be binned while maintaining chinese communism in all other realms. Liberal ideologists were wrong.
Anyway... by the time the www got big, this new version of chinese communism was mature, successful and confident. Google, wikipedia, later facebook... these are politically potent, and dangerous. The internet would influence political opinions. It would be exploited by foreign intelligence. It would harbour dissent, and dissent would grow into revolt... the ccp had no control of it. Besides politics, there were other issues. Economics, of course. Why not reserve these markets for chinese companies? Information security, espionage and other intelligence adjacent issues.
The ccp were correct on all points and the last decades proved it. The arab spring. Many elections worldwide, notably the 2016 US presidential. Prism. Flat earthers. $trn market caps. The ticktok backlash. All proof that Deng was right. Political potency. Intelligence potency. Economic potency. All too potent to stay hands off.
Back to the US... The US has basically come around to all these positions. Regardless of why Zuck is called to testify in congress, congressmen are most interested in political potency. Are you favouring my opponent's party more than mine? Is foreign intelligence operating on your platform?
US intelligence treats domestic internet companies as an asset, and foreign ones as adversaries. There isn't even much veneer anymore.
The economics also play, of course. It gets danced around for narrative/ideological reasons... but it's foolish to think the US would be neutral about Amazon's success vis a vis Alibaba.
In essence, the Dengist position has been adopted in the US. The internet americans access must be american controlled. Political reasons first. Intelligence reasons second. Economic reasons quitely.
In the short term this might be true. But any view that holds non-democratic authoritarianism up as a superior long-term approach has to grapple with the fact that open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century. This is in the face of world war, revolutions, and developments in communications technology that destabilized entire political movements.
Protests and electoral chaos are bad things, and new communications technologies can make them more destabilizing. But the ability to peacefully avoid something like 25 years of Maoism is worth an immeasurable amount of short-term chaos. We should be a little bit careful before we copy the Chinese approach.
Perhaps they don't care about performance, but rather control. The Qing dynasty of Imperial Chine ruled from 1644-1912:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty
They got their asses handed to them starting in the 1800s of course:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
But the current leadership may be happy with performing at 75% of open societies if they still get to run things: enough development to keep the outsiders at bay, not enough openness to cause trouble.
As long as their general rising prosperity, it may be good enough for most folks in China as well:
> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
> China’s betrayal at Versailles did not help the cause of liberalism in China. After all, it was the standard bearers of liberalism — the U.K., France, and the United States — that had negotiated secret treaties to give Shandong to the Japanese.
> Former liberals gravitated toward two main camps, both overtly Leninist in organization, both unapologetically authoritarian: the Nationalists and the Communists. By the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals believed that an authoritarian solution was China’s only recourse.
* https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...
I do, however, think the view that "open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century" is potentially naive, dangerous even. Did the 18th and 19th century "prove" that expansionist imperialism is superior to nationalism, democratic liberalism, etc?
We have a tendency to narrate history with cause-effect dynamics that compliment our ideals. If you believe in open society (I do), you tend to make this an anchor in your historical worldview.
In any case... the west, especially the US, is what "outperformed." If Roosevelt had been Russian & Lenin American, I don't think the 20th century would have played out the same but backwards. There are too many factors at play. History is not determined by ideological positions.
Post WWII, western european states certainly did outperform warsaw pact states. I think that's the strongest evidence of "superiority," but again there are many factors. Not least among them, Western germany traded within a much wealthier trade block. A similar dynamic affected China in the 80s. They suddenly had access to wealthy western markets. This creates wealth regardless of governing economic systems.
In my view, the political imperative is backwards. Open society must succeed for open society ideals to prevail. This as opposed to "success is important, therefore open societies ideas must be adopted." There is no ideological position that guarantees success. That is itself a communist perspective... messianic rationalism.
I don't believe history to be deterministic. Open societies are valuable for their own sake. How they perform is, IMO, attributable to "execution" above all else.
A lot of other discussions use “selective” facts to support their “superficial” points.
Edit: it was probably a much more significant change from the Chinese point of view than the Western one, since propertionally more Chinese speak English and browse English sites than Westerners speak Mandarin and browse Chinese sites.
Also, China did not ban US companies, but requires all foreign companies abide Chinese laws when operate in China. Apple have setup their data centre in China, iCloud is not banned. Similar story to Bing search, AWS, Azure etc..
> China did not ban US companies
Blocking domains via a countrywide firewall is as close as you get to “banning”. If it was about following laws you’d enforce that through legal means like everyone else, and not brute force.
I agree with the thrust of your general argument, but feel it necessary to point out that the list of countries with substantial and automatic filtering mechanisms is much larger than that. Eg, I've experienced censorship in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
Legal means can still involve brute force; for example, when a court somewhere decides that a certain type of content is abhorrent and should be put on an automatic DNS blacklist that ISPs are required to use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surv...
Eg, they do exist in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...), Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Japan) etc..
I used to think censorship was really just an instrument of the few to control the masses, but I'm starting to believe that we who just don't want a censored internet are the minority.
They say it's about the Chinese invading privacy and giving them selves an unfair advantage.
They could act like it and promote American encrypted chat apps like Signal but they fund the NSA to undercut American tech, encryption and privacy apps like Signal and resort to the same tyranny as china, the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent.
It was never about the Chinese it was always about justifying their current tyranny.
They absolutely can if they adhere to the law. LinkedIn and GitHub are thriving in China. Google and Facebook voluntarily pulled out.
Let’s put it this way: the Chinese Constitution makes strong guarantees about freedom of speech and press. But it doesn’t matter since there is no court to enforce any of that, China lacks any checks and balances and officials mostly rule by fiat and hierarchy.
I mostly think the tiktok ban is justified, for one because china has been playing unfair for ages now and because it is a national security problem when the chinese government could, at any moment, give itself access to this much information that could be used to blackmail large numbers of people.
It doesn't bear thinking about!
We can not have a major social network that is algorithmically driven controlled by a hostile foreign power. Full stop. Imagine if this were 40 years ago and tiktok was owned by the Soviets. Completely absurd.
>>Some might want "obscene" material gone, others would love to eradicate "fake news" and a few people might still be around that would instantly jump at any chance to purge the internet of blasphemy against their sky-daddy of choice.
It worked exactly like that before. It is our nature. We want to believe in different/opposite things and we are fine with chatting on opposite topics without going to do a real harm. That's psychology of escape, like an evening boxing or walking alone makes you calmer at the morning. You cannot make everyone happy in a single overpopulated diverse group, because it is much easier to fall into -isms and blow off the steam at the world instead of doing that at your gym. Free speech in www is basically moot.
US Internet penetration was only 50% in 2000, now up to 78%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/185700/percentage-of-adu...
In 1995 it was less than 10%.
Condolences on your epiphany. Now you realize that common people are the problem, not the rulers who are just being opportunistic.
And if you say it’s impossible to have both: until 24h or so ago, we did have it both. And in 24 weeks, we will have it again.
And who says they should?
1. You can just argue against them, that's how free speech ideally works.
2. Being technically allowed to say anything online does not and should not imply any legal immunity. Beyond that, if they're not committing any crimes, racists are allowed to express their opinions online, whether we like it or not.
3. Facebook, so long as they admit they're not a neutral platform, are allowed to enforce their own community guidelines. If they, without government intervention decide to ban racists, that's on them. Unless the government prevents you from building an alternative service, of course.
We will not, because such a move will be seen as pro-China and it’s not worth the political risk as the American population is fairly xenophobic.
The Democrats, if they win, will almost certainly quietly ignore this legislation.
Other presidents might not use it or abuse it as much as Trump, but you are kidding yourself If you think that genie is getting back in the bottle.
PS: I am not US citizen so just observer in this shit show that will affect us all.
It's good thing that more than just the US presidency is up for grabs in November then! To those who can vote in that election, find out where your potential legislative representatives stand on issues related to executive power. They have the ability to limit it, whether the president volunteers or not.
If I could just download these apps like I download software for linux, it would be very difficult for the govt to enforce anything like this.
Tik-tok banned in India too and by ban it merely meant that the govt. forced Google / Apple to remove it from the play store. There is complete ban on torrent / porn sites in India but that doesn't stop anyone from visiting those either.
I think this is just one more argument against these central repos that are aiding censorship and political propagandas.
However I doubt that not having them would stop the bans, it would take a bit more motivation, and a lot more effort but unless we have a truly censor-resistant solution I suspect the government would still put in the effort.
When software is source code, not just binary blobs, it starts to enjoy (some|more) protection under the 1st amendment.
This is incorrect. There are a set of sites which a few judges decided should be banned. There is no ban based on the category of the sites, or in other words newer sites based on these categories are not automatically banned.
Bitcoin and others dreamed of it for currency but it has failed for several reasons.
Europe standing clueless in the middle, European council with an average age of 70ish not understanding what all the fuss is about.
If asked, given the current state of these two entities, I would choose being spied on by the US government 100 out of 100 times over being spied on by the Chinese government.
I'm not going to China any time soon, but I need to cross the border to the US for work sometimes, and for pleasure sometimes, too. Since 9/11 that border has been an aggressive and hostile place marked by frequent highly authoritarian interventions and it has escalated even more under Trump. And its reach extends now onto our phones and thus into our private lives and this spying now extends online and profiles are being made of all sorts of people without them knowing. This has always happened, but its reach is far wider than before.
Being flagged by the US gov't hurts me directly, China only indirectly. I don't trust the US federal regime, and neither should (most) Americans.
EDIT: love being downvoted along with the other (European) comment. It's clear many Americans still don't get how their government behaves to its so-called allies. Ask Angela Merkel how she felt about having her phone tapped. Maybe the EU and other allies need to start randomly detaining US citizens with "strange names" or "suspicious profiles" and keeping them in rooms for hours, interrogate them, search their phones, then let them go with a smirk and a "have a nice day." Maybe then US citizens will understand how odious this is.
What I'm trying to say: it's better to be spied on by somebody that can't kidnap you. The Chinese can't really kidnap you in Europe, the US very much can.
And of course, the third option is preferred: don't be spied on by the US OR China, at least not to that degree. But that would require European Data Sovereignty, and that'll likely not go over well with the US, which is why the EU won't try.
I was curious about this and went to look: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/european-council/
I would say there's a very wide range of ages and experience there, but practically nobody is even 70 years old.
However it is true that the EU as a whole doesn't really care that much about an overall digital strategy and would probably leave that up to each individual country - how they would react if e.g. Italy started aggressively protecting its home grown tech I'm not sure.
It is not in the US strategic interest to "balkanise" the internet; as it is now the US has enormous influence over the global internet. Why replace that with something much smaller?
"Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks."
Looks like the goal isn't to balkanise the global internet. Rather, to create a zone where Chinese companies are banned from accessing it at all by integrating other countries into the Clean Netwok program starting with the US. Unlike China's great firewall which is purely domestic in scope, the Clean Network has global ambitions.
It would shame all those, including those SV thought leaders, who defend the US now engaging in the practice of "banning apps" based on short-sighted opportunism and "what about them" arguments, with now regard to fundamental principals we are supposed to stand for.
The idea of an open internet doesn't really work when you have countries that are not abiding by the "rules" like China that censor and utilize every chance they have to monitor user activity.
It is a sign not that the US is splitting the internet, but that work towards decentralizing stuff and evolve the web in such a way that it cannot be censored should be implemented.
Of course, countries can always "cut the cable" but that is too much of an economic hit I believe.
I think it would be better to just let china spy on the 12 year olds that use tictok and encourage Americans to use strong encryption / security by default.
Following the Chinese lead of censorship just encourages them to hack American companies like the Americans do.
That's a ton of kompromat. Even if irrelevant on average and on the whole, it'll impact enough individuals. Why give that kind of leverage away for free?
Though agreed regardless, we need to move towards E2E encryption, local storage, and local key management (i.e. no password resets... or complex recovery schemes).
A population with good critical thinking skills is necessary in a democracy. Conversely if you don't give people the right to vote for their leaders or policies, you don't need them to think critically (or politically) either.
Because this is the messaging the people will accept, a dictator could just say that's the way it is deal with it but they don't, they use the narrative the people will accept.
> Then the government gets to decide what is or isn't misinformation. >> The only solution people provide is that we need to get rid of the bad information
There is no "the government" its just people, two factions the red flag and the blue flag both get their information from their own isolated sources of what is accurate. The truth is somewhere in the middle ground with both sides deciding that whatever doesn't fit their current clic is misinformation. Democracy is great at giving us two flags instead of one but I don't really give a fuck about flags I care about individual freedom.
> A population with good critical thinking skills is necessary in a democracy.
100% and I feel our democracy is failing because people are just not motivated toward critical thinking, its difficult and calls yourself into question, what if you are wrong? or supported something you no longer believe in? in a world with cancel culture and mob justice? Fascism is a low effort alternative for many. Simple problem: all the other flag wavers, simple solution: get rid of them.
If democratic countries want to remain that way we need to give up our tyranny and flag waving in support of real freedom. People won't do it naturally we need to change the system to encourage people to think by rewarding them for doing so. Change peoples motives toward critical thinking and democracy and away from fascism and tyranny.
I think it's yes to the former and no to the later. I don't have good evidence though.
Good to see the BBC [AKA Radio Free America] continuing to uphold its [mostly self-awarded] reputation for unbiased reporting.
PS: in the above context, it should be: authoritarian governments'
These days, the standard of literacy ain't much to write home about either.
Some countries (like France for instance) impose DNS censorship on ISP to block some domains.
And I think that there is a good reason for ability for doing that to be there. Some countries will abuse that however.
There are other examples goolgle search away~Most people.
The problem here isn't any one person circumventing the 'censorship', it's influencing mass movements to prevent mass data-grabbing. If every tech-savvy Linux user uses TikTok, it's probably not that big of a deal as it's less than one percent of the population (and arguably the group most well-equipped to deal with the potential spying).
More like they would block all network traffic that is not from apps, authenticated via one of the approved cloud providers.
I have a few questions. Would this apply only to Apple and Google app stores? Would jailbroken phones still legally be able to install the apps? Would third-party app stores legally be able to distribute them?
If the government tells an app store not to sell a specific program, isn't that similar to telling a bookstore not to sell a specific book? How does the government argue that the free speech protections of the Constitution don't apply?
A field century even.
Look at what happened to Usenet, its still there, but many major ISPs don't offer access to it to my knowledge.
Larger email providers mark all email from self hosted servers as spam in most cases.
Chat is mostly on proprietary apps. The majority of the population does not use open standards for chat.
One can readily argue that China has already split the internet, to an extent. In the best case, one can imagine that the US is stumbling-toward/leading-the-way into a world where free expression and freedom from monitoring is requisite for unfettered access to the predominant global communications network. I hope that is the ultimate destination.
The Trump administration is unlikely to be able to finish that work, but a line in the sand to state that outright monitoring of global citizens is unacceptable seems like a good place to start. To make this work, the United States must also refrain from deeply monitoring the speech and actions of citizens of other countries. It is reasonable to expect the EU to require local hosting of a lot more US cloud services in the coming year.
If the world is to balkanize, it may also mean that cross-border interactions are dominated by open-source software and open protocols. A silver lining in a dark cloud.
This is Cloudflare's endgame. It's not just authoritarian nationstates. It's also (in the US at least) authoritarian corporations.
This is not just about TikTok or other apps, and not just about app stores. As the title says, it's about whether we will have open networks in the future.
"Clean Carrier: To ensure untrusted People’s Republic of China (PRC) carriers are not connected with U.S. telecommunications networks. Such companies pose a danger to U.S. national security and should not provide international telecommunications services to and from the United States."
https://www.state.gov/announcing-the-expansion-of-the-clean-...
Note that it's also not just about the CCP, but "malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party".
Do you think the US administration has enough integrity to be trusted with such matters?
If they are doing it as a direct response to China, then yes. If China decides to start playing nicely, then we will roll it back.
We act in response to how they conduct themselves. China is like a child. If they behave, we play toys with them. If they misbehave, we put them in timeout
It's not just the US. Countries around the world are slowly coming to the realization that they can really only regulate the portions of the internet housed within their legal jurisdictions, and that data sovereignty matters.
Is the US splitting the internet? That's debatable. I think we started the process with the Patriot Act. That led to multiple countries passing new privacy and data localization laws (GDPR in Europe, Data Localization in Russia). I believe that the current proposals coming out of State are best characterized as a (clumsy) attempt at data localization through executive fiat.
Of course, this could also just be revenge for a bunch of TikTok users trolling the president pretty hard.
I don't have the legal team to negotiate GDPR, so I can't make my website legal in Europe (it probably is, I collect practically nothing, but I can't be sure since IANAL.
I don't have an apple product, so my app can't be tested or converted to work in Apple devices and put in their App store.. so if you like what I made, and you don't have an Android device, you can't use it on mobile...
If you want to use my web interface, if it's Chromium, you now need to go through an extra step to unblock cookies to jump from one of my sites to another, because the subdomain changes and that's "a different website" now..
Seems like everyone is already splintering the Internet... Most of it is the US's fault, but it's not just TikTok..
The alternative network, what we have, is dirty, soiled, unhealthy, blemished - because of Chinese influence. By removing China from the connection, the network is cleansed.
It's transparently racist. It is not necessary to use words like this if you have a persuasive argument based upon facts. This is an appeal to ignorance and fear of things that are filthy.
Bullshit. China a geopolitical entity (notably, one of the "authoritarian dictatorship" variety) and explicitly don't support democracy.
Not sure if Google will do it, or if they do, they might take their sweet time.