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Trump's WeChat ban threatens Apple's smartphone sales in China
- golem14 6y agoIt would be trivial for the admin to say that Apple only has to block wechat from the US app store, and trivial for Apple to implement it. There's little to gain from blocking wechat in china, so I don't think they will cut in their own flesh. Unless there are ways (via VPN etc) to temporarily switch a phone to the Chinese appstore and install wechat for a US phone this way.
- analyst74 6y agoWould it be legal for American companies to ignore American laws on foreign land? It doesn't sound plausible
- gruez 6y agoCan't you set up some sort of foreign subsidiary to do it for you? Apple already uses this model for storing icloud data in china, to comply with chinese laws.
- adrr 6y agoI am willing to bet the App Store is an Ireland based entity with contracts back to Apple to provide service aka generate expenses for Apple's US entity. That way Apple can book all the app store revenue in Ireland.
- valuearb 6y agoI am willing to bet you don’t understand US corporate tax laws and accounting rules.
- valuearb 6y agoA presidential order is not a law, and if unconstitutional like this one, never has to be obeyed anywhere.
- reaperducer 6y agonever has to be obeyed anywhere That's not how it works. It has to be obeyed until invalidated by a court. You can't just tell a law enforcement agency, "I know the president said x, but that's unconstitutional." Law enforcement is not lawyers, or constitutional scholars. That's for the judiciary to sort out.
- valuearb 6y agoYou have it backwards, law enforcement has to go to court to attempt to have WeChat removed from Apple devices. They can’t just confiscate random iPhones to scrape it off their storage, and they aren’t bursting into Apple HQ to force its removal from their servers.
- sbahr001 6y agoIt depends on how intense the law/sanctions are. Example, no US company can trade/do business with Iran,even indirectly. The Trump administration also made it difficult for other countries to do business with Iran, makes it almost impossible for any other country to business with them.Hence, Iran's economy is in the toilet, and it can only trade with Russia, China and the middle eastern countries they have high-influence over(which are typically poor). Their oil can be sold to western countries, due to OPEC, but money that ends up in foreign accounts are inaccessible. Plus, most of Trump's policies of late with China has to do with the new Silk Road. The new Silk Road is seeing China expand(land grabs) into other countries, and take over strategic points. Since, a lot of China's economy is from foreign trade, the more US makes trade difficult the harder it is for China to expand. Time, will tell if this strategy works or not, when China becomes the #1 superpower/economy in the world(speculation, but is looking more likely).
- FillardMillmore 6y agoFor anyone who didn't know what was meant by 'the new Silk Road': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
- sbahr001 6y agoThank you!
- ralph84 6y agoPeople regularly go to prison for violating US trade sanctions. The majority of Apple's employees including all of their executives are in the US and easy to find. I doubt any of them are volunteering to test the boundaries of US trade sanctions.
- PeterisP 6y agoWhile the administration could say that Apple only has to block wechat from the US app store, it's not what they have done and they have not indicated that they want to go that way; the currently announced prohibition, as far as I understand, would prohibit Apple to support WeChat anywhere no matter if it allows installing WeChat for a US phone this way or not.
- golem14 6y ago... because the current admin is not exactly in the habit of thinking ahead. I see no reason they intentionally want to hurt the goose laying golden eggs. I’d be happy to learn valid reasons why though.
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- DataWorker 6y agoYou just described the past few decades of the whole of the DC elites thinking about China. The goose is a Trojan horse as any idiot can see. Sell out the future of democracy to keep apple stock price soaring. Short sighted indeed.
- scarface74 6y agoDid you watch the Senate hearing with the tech CEOs? Half were more concerned about “big tech being mean to conservatives” than they were about doing anything “for Democracy”. And then you had the one representative grilling Zuckerberg about Twitter’s policies.
- golem14 6y agoHow is letting Apple running localized chat apps in China selling out our future democracy?
- Barrin92 6y ago>The goose is a Trojan horse the moral of the story was that the Greeks brought the horse to Troy, I'm unsure how forcing Apple to exist the Chinese market helps the US?
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- draw_down 6y agoWhenever an engineer (we're on HN so I'm assuming) uses the word "trivial", my spidey senses start tingling.
- leptoniscool 6y agoThis is a very short-sighted move, it will lead to lower investments from China to US in tech and other sectors.
- abc-xyz 6y agoDoes that mean western organizations will finally stop censoring western people living in western countries? Will they finally stop banning people for voicing support for democracy in Hong Kong? Or for condemning concentration camps in Xinjiang? Will they finally stop ruining their products in their attempt to be granted access to the Chinese market? Will western employees finally be able to ‘like’ a tweet thanking their company for listing Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan on their website without being fired?
- benrbray 6y agoI sure hope so. I have not agreed with this administration on hardly anything else, but I agree with this. The United States has its own dark history of censorship and oppression, but authoritarianism poses an even bigger threat. At the moment, China is a huge market for technology and entertainment, and companies who refuse to do business with them, accept investments from them, etc. on moral grounds clearly cannot compete with companies who are willing to bend over backwards for the chance to dip their hands in the infinite money bucket. We cannot let an authoritarian government exert so much control over our technology, movies, television, games, and social media. If we do, democracy is already lost.
- reaperducer 6y agoDoes that mean western organizations will finally stop censoring western people living in western countries? For me, the big test will be the NBA. It has stated that it will allow players to display social justice messages on their jerseys. It has also punished people for supporting Hong Kong. If I had a million dollars, I'd pay some big name basketball star to put "Free Hong Kong" on his jersey, just to watch the fireworks.
- apta 6y agoEveryone should boycott the CCP due to their horrid Holocaust-like genocide they're committing right now.
- archibaldJ 6y agoThis is meaningless. If Wechat is really banned Tencent (or a shell company owned by Tencent) will just spring up another app with a different name that connects to the same data centers and put it on the App Store. Wechat is pretty much the RPC-equivalence of Facebook+Whatsapp with Paypal integrated, used by pretty much everyone on the mainland as well as RPC who are overseas but still want or need to be part of the social networks, or just anyone that wants or needs to do business with people in China. If people actually believe enforcing a ban like this will in any way hurt Tencent or CCP then that is just ridiculous. This will only accelerate the already growing Anti-American sentiment in China. And the new Wechat app with a different name will be out maybe in a week or something. Wechat is a very different case as compared to TikTok with vastly different use cases and user groups. The reasons behind why people use the two apps are fundamentally different.
- aw1621107 6y ago> If Wechat is really banned Tencent (or a shell company owned by Tencent) will just spring up another app with a different name that connects to the same data centers and put it on the App Store. IIRC the executive order doesn't address WeChat/TikTok directly, but instead forbids interactions with their parent companies. I think this means that the ban can't be worked around by just reskinning the app. Not sure how it would work with shell companies, though.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoHmmm, China bans western companies, but complains when the behavior is reciprocated.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoWhenever someone says this, I ask them which companies are banned (far fewer than many Westerners seem to think), and point out that Western companies are far more ubiquitous in China than vice versa.
- reaperducer 6y agoWestern companies are far more ubiquitous in China than vice versa Except at Wal-Mart. Where non-Chinese goods are so rare they get special labels and promotion.
- zepto 6y agoAnd Amazon, and Ebay
- vmception 6y agoI think we're talking about Google, Facebook and gaming consoles. Do you really think that is a strong argument? We're cutting some Chinese companies out for some reasons, some of which are privacy, some of which are ideological (protectionist/privacy), some of which are petty. They cut some western companies out for some reasons, some of which are content based, some of which are ideological (content/privacy), some of which are petty.
- oxymoran 6y agoNo, they are being cut out because they are owned by Communists who have over a million people in forced re-education camps and have ambitions of replacing the US as the global superpower.
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- m3kw9 6y agoApple can issue a custom certificate with unlimited installs to sort of side load it outside AppStore. Similar to enterprise certs.