I'm old enough to remember when the US government did something very similar. For years (decades?), we banned any implementation of public-key cryptography under the guise of the technology being akin to munitions.

People made shirts with printouts of the code to RSA under the heading "this shirt is a munition." Apparently such shirts are still for sale, even though they are not classified as munitions anymore.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

I am not that old, but I did a deep dive on this in the past because it was just so extremely fascinating, especially reading the archives of Cypherpunk. There is a very solid, if rather bendy, line connecting all that to "crypto culture" today.

Were these implementations already easily open source accessible at the time, with tens of thousands of people already actively using them on their computers? No, right? Doesn't seem feasible this time around.

Yes they were.

The ban was on exporting the code, not having the code in possession.

Furthermore it was only the US who had this ban.

I am old enough to remember this and the scoffing that European PGP users had towards their American counterparts

Sounds like it was ineffective then, despite an export ban being easier to uphold than what would amount to an import ban?

I don’t think an import ban would be any harder to enforce than an export ban. In fact if anything, I’d expect an import ban to be easier.

Though I’m not suggesting an import ban on DeepSeek would be effective either. Just that the US does have precedence pulling these kinds of stunts.

You can also look at the 90s subculture for passing DeCSS code (a tool for breaking DVD encryption) to see another example of how people wilfully skirted these kinds of stupid legal limitations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

So if you were to ask me if a ban on DeepSeek would work, the answer is clearly “no”. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. And if it does, the only people hurt are legitimate US businesses who might get a benefit from DeepSeek but have to follow the law. Those of us outside of America will be completely unaffected. Just like we were when US tried to limit the distribution of GPG.

> Can't really ban what can be downloaded for free and hosted by anyone.

Like music? They banned napster

Yet I can still download music. Check mate.

Napster was one of thousands, if not 10s of thousands of similar services for music download.

And this analogy isn't particularly good. Napster was the server, not the product. Whether you got XYZ from Napster or wherever else doesn't matter, because its the product that you are after, not the way to get the product.