Apple has already stated (with regards to China) that they will respect the laws of the nation they are offering service in. So while they put up a constant assault against privacy invading moves in the US, they handed chicom the keys to iCloud with zero pushback.

If this passes you can be sure anything digital is no longer safe from alphabet agencies. Sadly the younger generation has no concern for privacy and the older generation likely has no clue their data is being siphoned. Advocates are too much of a minority to make a difference.

Already today, as a European iOS developer with your apple developer program contract counterparty being their European corp, you still have to deal with US export restrictions and self reporting paperwork if you make a single HTTPS call in your iOS app (because somehow, your app is being exported from "iTunes in the US" even when both you, your app, your target audience, and the counterpart of your development program are European entities)...

Not necessarily affecting software developed outside the US, but most likely if your non-US company has communications in your app and US customers, you'll be screwed. For consumers, vice versa with using apps from FAANG since your communications will now be affected by nonsense US laws. This is of course unless the big companies want to split their apps into US & Worldwide versions, which is probably not happening and would cause other forms of feature drift if they did so.

I wouldn’t bet against a USA-RoW split any more. ~90% of internet users are outside America now, and even accounting for income differences more than 2/3rds of the money is outside the USA.

The world is welcome to compete with American tech, and has been trying very hard at it for quite a long time.

Hmm. I'm not sure the Chinese government would agree with your first statement. They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement.

Yes, I'm aware of some of the issues surrounding IP copying. I won't call it theft because the word is contentious and there are those in this forum who don't think you can steal ideas.

I'm also aware of the US' own history of gathering IP to bootstrap its industrial efforts. I guess that "but you did it first" isn't a good defence in law (not really sure of that, after all IANAL) but it makes the US case weaker in my eyes.

> They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement.

Do you think that's related to China allowing zero domestic tech competition, but demanding that their companies be allowed to compete in the rest of the world?

America hasn't been trying that hard to make a power grab on shared tech like encryption, so it's possible that the rest of the world will have a fighting chance.

And America is welcome to put up a fair fight instead of banning competitors.

If a fair fight is one where everybody plays by the same rules, then America fights as fair as you can get.

The main issue with something like this though isn’t really about the rest of the world catching up to the US technologically. It’s a question of whether service providers would choose not operating in the US over following their rules. But given the size of the US market, you’d find a lot of service providers choosing to follow the rules.

Which is incidentally the same way EU nations enforce their laws on companies like Google. And how countries like France, Germany and UK would enforce the anti-encryption laws they’ve been trying for years to get on the books.

Most countries capable of doing that already have similar or even stricter laws. In a few decades there will be no country in the world that doesn't do something like this. It's over, the privacy war is already lost

Have a nice day, DOJ.