Dark Arc

Likewise, I think this bill could be used against companies with Chinese investment, like anything Tencent investment (e.g. Fortnite, League of Legends, etc).

IANAL but I believe that would not be covered under this bill. Those games are run by American companies with foreign investment.

Maybe when it gets to the point where the foreign power is the majority shareholder. However, I think in a publicly traded company they’d just be forced to divest and that would likely take a different law.

Just the standard “you can sue if you think this is unfair and have your day in court.”

What it looks like is if China or Russia has a competitor to a US product (say, Yandex or Baidu), a US company (say, Google) could lobby the President to mark them as a threat and ban them from the US. The product doesn’t need to actually have the capacity to cause harm, it just needs to be from one of the adversary countries (currently China, Russia, N. Korea, and Iran).

This is true, but it’s also pretty unlikely. Even TikTok is just a vine ripoff, but a vine that was successfully monetized.

There really hasn’t been much to come out of our “foreign adversaries” that I think most people would care about. If that’s the price we have to pay … I’m not the least bit worried about it really.

Furthermore, China is happy to use public money to back companies (as a sort of “state run venture capital”); that is a threat to competition in the same way venture capital is a threat to competition.

I think you should check out this article in The Atlantic, it goes into the history of the US government’s previous laws to protect against foreign propaganda and manipulation of the media. What you’ll find is this is more of an update (to catch up with the internet era) than a revamp of US domestic policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/

Also a key point I think you’re missing here:

but it also allows the President to denote any other entity in one of those countries as a significant threat

The president can only do this for apps from the countries covered in the US code as Foreign Adversaries, which means the president can act quickly against threats, but this is a bad avenue for attacking competition in other friendly countries (e.g., shutting down Proton would require congress to pass a law that Switzerland is a foreign adversary – which would not be good for relations – AND a law specifically targeting Proton accompanying that or the president to then act against Proton).

All of this is still subject to judicial review as well.

See https://lemmy.world/post/14643617

I’m sure it’s just even more detail about the scope of that influence campaign (and possibly an extrapolation of effectiveness on public opinion).

The major thing is manipulation of the public’s information pipeline by a hostile foreign power. There are already existing laws about foreign owned media (as cited by the New York Times this morning https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/).

It’s far more common for Democrat run municipalities to create municipal cable and for Republicans to outlaw (or propose outlawing) municipal cable state wide.

It’s not even politicizing it’s a literal Republican talking point that the government should stay out of things and let free market competition sort these things out.

The problem with that of course is that they’d rather take money from some regional monopolies than actually create a free market system with reasonable restrictions on it.

I haven’t given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.

The entire premise of Discord’s free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide “free service” based on venture capital like that.

TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they’re a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).

Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it’s received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).

Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit

Have they? In what way?

They’ve done good work for Android and Pixel, promising 7 years of updates for the latest Pixels. Samsung has also gotten much better about this with their recent phones. That’s going to put a huge dent in the e-waste as Android phones have surely been heavy contributors (certainly much higher than fitbit).

TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades.

What TVs? Vizio, Hisense, the Chinese junk budget brands?

Very sympathetic to your e-waste concerns; I think the source of the problem is actually getting better not worse though. In general, the mobile tech sector is “growing up” and supporting products longer.

This is definitely top 10 Linux memes of all time for me.