A ban by President Donald Trump’s administration on Chinese mobile apps such as TikTok and WeChat risks fragmenting an already fragile global internet and creating an American version of China’s « Great Firewall. »
August 7,2020 A ban by President Donald Trump’s administration on Chinese mobile apps such as TikTok and WeChat risks fragmenting an already fragile global internet and creating an American version of China’s « Great Firewall. » Fears about the global internet ecosystem intensified this week with Trump’s executive orders banning the popular video app TikTok and Chinese social network WeChat, following a US government directive to prohibit the use of other « untrusted » applications and services from China. The restrictions announced on the basis of what Trump called national security threats move further away from the long-promoted American ideal of a global, open internet and could invite other countries to follow suit, analysts said. « It’s really an attempt to fragment the internet and the global information society along US and Chinese lines, and shut China out of the information economy, » said Milton Mueller, a Georgia Tech University professor and founder of the Internet Governance Project. Mueller said this represents a move « to create a Western firewall » similar to the Chinese barrier, which would be enforced with US economic sanctions globally. This could backfire on Silicon Valley giants which dominate the online world outside China because « there are lots of nationalistic governments around the world which could make the same claims about Apple and Google and Facebook and Twitter, that they are sucking up data, » Mueller said.
