In my opinion, banning foreign websites/apps is just as bad as banning foreign literature.
Why is it different now?
Trade restrictions are usually levied reciprocally, and trade agreements made to enforce equal market access or even outcomes. (E.g. you can sell Japanese cars in the US if Japan makes those cars with US steel ).
Even without blocking, countries could ask to seize operation and block them from accepting payment effectively killing it.
Unless you're freeloading off of public and open wifi networks, every single person in America is paying someone (who reserves the right to refuse service to anyone) for the privilege of accessing the internet.
Unless you're freeloading off of public or open wifi networks, you are paying someone for the privilege to access the internet on their terms. The US government couldn't care less one way or another whether you have internet.
Internet access is not a right. It could be in another century or two like how the telephone turned out, but we aren't there yet and we shouldn't speak of it as such.
Just pass a law of automatic recipricol action for any country. If any country bans "X category" then ban anything coming FROM that country with the same category. If China wants tiktok to operate in the US then they must allow twitter, facebook, and all of the other applications to operate within China. That's the entire point of globalism. It's not a one way street.
South Front and Strategic Culture are two such examples.
Russia Today etc are not reachable from most EU countries.
That's total bullshit, and if you don't know it you have your head stuck in the sand. There are all kinds of things that are censored, usually for legitimate reasons.
Nothing will happen to your TikTok access if it's sold to an acceptable buyer. It's fine for the US to ban it if that doesn't happen, just like it's fine for the US to ban some Chinese company per-positioning antiaircraft missiles and tanks on US property that it happens to own.
I suggest you focus your efforts on ByteDance to encourage a sale.
Liberal democracy is not something you are, it is something you do.
It is the sum set of beliefs, actions, and understandings of the country that results in the state of its governance.
Freedom is not an inevitable result of "being" a democracy.
Freedom is an aggregate result of the way individuals act.
> China blocks the world-wide internet because it follows a totalitarian ideology.
What you might not have considered is that if a foreign power is able to influence your fellow citizens, those fellow citizens might be weaponized against you. Before America was a republic it was part of a monarchy and individual citizens became convinced it was worth fighting to change. That was a good change, but citizens might just as easily be convinced that maybe fast results and less bureaucracy and rules are what we need and it's worth putting a strongman into power for faster results: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-strongman-fantasy
Freedom is also the freedom to be ignorant. What happens if too many people are ignorant?
Freedom is also the freedom to do the wrong thing. What happens if too many people do the wrong thing?
Freedom is not a pure concept synonymous with "good." Freedom can bend, but it can also break.
It was meant to be rhetorical now - as the USSR did not have TV or radio stations in the US (but, yes, you could get USSR newspapers). Differentiating between different "attack vectors" isn't new.
Imagine if the U.S. banned a Chinese book series because we were concerned it would "undermine our institutions and society". Does that sound like a free country?
From recent reports that's apparently most, if not all, of them.
As a quick follow up query, can Chinese, UK, Australian, etc. companies buy up data on US citizens from brokers? Is that OK, it's probably for business reasons after all .. or friendly five eyes cross border mutual spying to take the stink off.