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.
