Why? Copy cats are normal, everybody copies things that are successful in other countries. How do you assure that the company that creates a new app "out of the blue" isn't secretly funded by China? Require a background check and federal approval before an app can be downloaded more than 1000 times?
You can't move around the many millions of dollars in advertising without the government being aware of it. Good old fashioned investigative work and arrest of anyone knowingly contributing to wirefraud is sufficient to stop clandestine apps from growing to the size of tiktok.
Sort of like how the CFO of Huawei is currently in jail.
Creating orwellian straw man arguments is not a productive method of conversation. Please stop.
> You can't move around the many millions of dollars in advertising without the government being aware of it.
Why would you need to? I don't understand the point you're making. It's not about the money, it's about data, right? Presumably the Chinese aren't using Tik Tok to fund their government, they're happy to spend money on data collection. From the outside, you can't tell whether a company is collecting user data to give them to the Chinese intelligence service or just to engage in "good old American surveillance capitalism". That these kinds of operations can collect data and fund themselves is just the cherry on top.
My point is that if "location of development" team and "immediate source of funding" are the criteria, you might keep the average Chinese developer out that just wants to release his hobby app. But you're not keeping out anyone that's dedicated, has money to spend and can just do it in plain sight, because the actual acts are not the criteria you look at, because they're identical to the things your companies do (which they obviously don't want to stop from collecting data).
If the initiative was for simply protecting companies and individuals from tracking and spying, I'd be on board and I could easily see how that might have some success. But it's not, and short of forcibly removing anyone with Chinese heritage from the US and doing lie detector test on everyone else to make sure they're not secretly working for China, there's no way to keep anyone safe from Chinese data collection invasive anti-privacy companies while not interfering with the regular invasive anti-privacy companies. Well, maybe by looking at growth rate and use of dark patterns, the Chinese agents might fear being uncovered and won't go all out with the abuse...
> Creating orwellian straw man arguments is not a productive method of conversation. Please stop.
Not everybody is a Chinese agent. "We will build a wall, it'll be great, nobody will be able to come through, and China will pay for it" just doesn't sound like a good plan to me.
> Why would you need to? I don't understand the point you're making. It's not about the money, it's about data, right?
It's inevitably about both. You don't make an app with the reach of tiktok without a huge amount of money changing hands. You need to advertise it, you need to motivate content creation, you need to buy servers, you need to pay for that (probably by selling advertising - but funding from the government works as well), and so on.
If someone made a popular app without a source of revenue, that would be just as much of a red flag that I would expect the government to look into (for tax reasons even).
You can't stop small things no one uses, big things have but noticeable footprints. Big things are also the things you care about stopping if your goal is to do things like "not let China collect a complete social graph".
