In comments on Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provided a first glimpse of what the new Cold War with China is going to look like. If Pompeo has his way, it’s a lot of technological decoupling between the US and China.
With Chinese companies gaining popularity in the US, Pompeo called on companies to deny all access to those apps on their stores, to prevent US customers from accessing Chinese apps. He further called on US appmakers to keep their own apps from being available in China.
Even more ambitious, Pompeo called for a “Clean Network,” whereby the whole world would agree to cobble together a new Internet and keep China off of it. It’s not clear why this would benefit anyone other than the US, which is hostile to China just as a matter of course.
Since the real point of the Internet is global communications, not excluding one country that the US is kinda mad at, there probably won’t be a lot of uptake on this idea. Still, the US may hope to find some function for which “everyone but China” is an appealing draw.
Chinese officials criticize the US effort as hypocritical and misguided, noting that things they are accusing Chinese app providers of doing are the exact things the US has been doing with American apps for years, and calling for a free and open cyberspace.
Good!
I am not sure the premise of the article is correct, This has nothing to do with “having takers”. It is not an option for any country using Google or Facebook. Those companies are US companies — and they are under order to remove offending social media app.
The implications are huge. I have no idea what kind of contract Germany or other countries have with US electronic platforms, but if in fact US controls what Germany can buy and install — that means that US can unilaterally cripple any country’s not just Internet — but also all their IT capabilities. Should a ban be issued on the use of — say Microsoft Windows — it could cripple many countries.
Again, I have no idea if US can dictate terms to the usage of American corporations license agreements.
This is essentially the end of free trade. If any country can control the usage if so called open platforms, then market is closed. This is the end of WWW. The digital revolution monopolized. What Europe is trying to do is to put taxes on American digital platforms. It will be now doubly justified — as no openness is claimed any more.
The same move was executed when Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer was prohibited from producing Huawei chips due to American-purchased instruments being used by the factory. There were no such stipulations in the purchase contract. The outcome is — US equipment would be avoided in the future. Japan just started chip production pilot using only Japanese components.
The problem here is — short term shock effect is a poor consolation for long tern losses and risk of retaliation. The problem with any country used to play offense only — is not thinking defensively or even being capable of defense. Is this election so much worth to anyone to start a war over it?
The good news is that we’re all free to ignore the supposed ban on TikTok/WeChat.
Installing and running a VPN is almost as easy as falling off a log, and learning to “side load” apps that aren’t available in official stores like Google Play isn’t much harder.
The Chinese regime has a quarter century head start on the US regime when it comes to trying to control the Internet and is still failing miserably.