Comment by Nasrudith

Really they are seperate matters of banning in my opinion of speech vs payment as murky and intertwined as they may be. Demonetizing it is far more defensible than banning the speech per se and far less exploitable and narrower scoped to the goals.

Essentially in this case it would make more sense to embargo financial systems from Chinese application developers (putting aside how poorly the attempted trade war have gone in the past) but the apps themselves being technically legal.

I am not sure of the actual cold war legal specifics but it would be like the difference between wiring money to Pravda being illegal funding of the USSR but republishing it in the US to point out what the hell they are saying internally would be protected. (The piracy being allowed is essentially a feature - why privledge enemies with your enforcement absent existing treaties?)