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Translated to a more familiar medium, the analogy would be: “bookstores can no longer sell that title, but that’s ok because people who already own a copy can s
by matthewdgreen 6y ago
Translated to a more familiar medium, the analogy would be: “bookstores can no longer sell that title, but that’s ok because people who already own a copy can still read it.” I’m not a constitutional scholar, but this seems like a pretty weak counterargument to me.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoI agree with your analogy, and I agree that this is a terrible move. But for the demographic mentioned ("this order prevents millions of Americans from using their primary (and oftentimes only) method to communicate with family in China"), I find it vanishingly unlikely that any of them doesn't already have wechat. The order has essentially zero immediate effects on them.
- matthewdgreen 6y agoOn the contrary, I think it's vastly more consequential than the corresponding argument wrt a hard-copy book or CD-ROM. A single OS upgrade can render an application completely inoperable. Had this ban been timed slightly differently, the recent iOS 14 update could have shut down every copy running on iOS devices. Every typical iOS user (and many Android users) are "N days" from total failure of the app on their device, for values of N ranging to a few hundred.