Comment by palata

I said, and I quote:

> I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism

The irony I see is that we criticize their protectionism, but we also do some kind of protectionism. More largely, we criticize the fact that they ban US companies, and then we do the same. How in the world is that not ironic?

It would be perfectly fine to admit it and acknowledge that actually, sometimes protectionism makes sense. But if you look at the answers in this thread, it seems like nobody wants to do that. "We are never wrong, it is not ironic, it is obviously national security".

So let's talk about national security. TikTok is a userspace social media app, just like Instagram or Snapchat. If collecting that kind of data is an obvious national security risk, then every single country in the world should ban them. What would the US say if all the western countries banned their social media? Would you say "we understand, it's a national security issue"? My guess is that you would say "but for us it's different: we are the good guys".

What about Huawei? Fair enough, infrastructures like antennas are very sensitive, don't let a Chinese company own them on your soil. But the smartphones? Really? Any government can buy stuff like NSO's Pegasus and get access to any mobile phone (iPhones included). Let's not pretend that someone buying a Huawei phone makes that worse, shall we? And it's still obviously fine to ask sensitive personalities (like politicians) to use a non-Chinese smartphone, but that's very different from banning the brand entirely.

DJI then? The drones don't have an Internet connection: you have to connect them to your WiFi (be it at home or a mobile hotspot from your phone). That means that if you fly above government facilities, the drone is not streaming the video to China. That also means that if it wanted to, it would have to go through your mobile hotspot, through your ISP. Doesn't seem that hard to ask government drone operators to connect through a firewall, does it? Every big company in the world asks all of their employees to do that.

And when did it start being seen as a security issue? Precisely when western companies started lobbying against them because they could not compete. Nobody complained about DJI for years, especially not when the view in western startups was "we are better, we will make a better drone". It took us to realise that DJI was actually a lot better than us to start looking for other ways. Look at who's been lobbying a lot for the ban: western drone companies that have no reason to know about security, but that are struggling because - let's be honest - DJI drones are a lot cheaper and a lot better than anything else.

And now we have US billionaires and owners of the biggest tech companies in the world publicly interfering with politics in allied countries. How the hell is that not ironic?