Restricting communication with China isn’t just a restriction on China, but on Americans. These laws prevent Americans from freely associating.
You see the same spin with immigration and trade restrictions. They are in fact a restriction of Americans’ freedom to trade and associate, but are always presented from the other angle (as a restriction on foreigners).
When I (EU citizen) was on holliday in Cuba, I met a woman from US who had to do some special things to be able to visit that country as a tourist. She tried to make sure the US didn't know about it. "Freedom" is very relative indeed.
A lot of the investigative journalism that goes on these days often involves people just looking at the traces left out in the open on public websites. Think of how much of what we know of the regional suppression programs in Xinjiang comes from volunteers looking at government requests for contractors and the like. A world without a shared internet is a world where Human rights abuses can carry on unobserved.
From a position external to both China and the US, it's really hard to see a meaningful difference between the vague propaganda and doublespeak in this announcement and the same kind of announcements from the CCP.
A funny coincidence: The "Clean Network" was literally the exact same as "净网" campaigns in China which CCP unleash fierce crackdown on media and Internet to purge unwelcome content.
I don't think this is propaganda or doublespeak. It's an escalation of the trade war with China by threatining to ban PRC participation in the U.S. economy--basically what they're threatening to do to TikTok except across several areas of the economy.
This is incredibly vague. Is this a proposal for some kind of standard or protocol? It says that "many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos", so whatever it is it can't be that difficult to achieve.
Is someone familiar enough with this to provide a source that discusses what "Clean Carrier/Telco/Store/etc" entails technically?
Also, how does this impact countries outside the US that have significant interactions with it like Canada or Mexico? Will their telco carriers have to remove all Huawei equipment before connecting to US telco networks to provide roaming services? Do cellphones coming in from those countries have to be scanned to ensure no blacklisted apps are installed?
> Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.
Seems like the idea is to form a network that's "clean" of PRC influence.
This isn't about technology, it's about organizations and vendors. It's saying that PRC carriers may not connect directly to US telecommunications networks; that PRC apps cannot be available in app stores selling to US customers; that PRC smartphone manufacturers may not bypass the restriction on stores by selling phones to Americans with PRC apps pre-installed; that US cloud properties must be accessible to PRC companies; and that undersea cables aren't tapped by PRC intelligence agencies.
It's not about technology, it's about a business qualification for US telecoms and technology companies like Apple and Amazon. If they meet these standards, they're part of the "clean network" (which is just ugly obvious racism).
As a practical matter, this is dubious because there's hundreds of ways around these requirements bureaucratically. The value of this is the threat to China, that specific examples like TikTok can be chosen and banned; or that third parties like European businesses might move away from China to avoid jeopardizing U.S. business. This is just another front in the trade war.
Your first paragraph seems accurate. I think this move represents a failure of the spiritual goals of the Internet to provide standardized interconnection between networks globally, so I don't approve of the move. That said, I think you are far too casually throwing out the term "racist" in your comments here and elsewhere in the thread.
There are blatant, obvious actions that the CCP has taken or sponsored which have negatively impacted the security and privacy of people who are not citizens of China and data sovereignty is not a foreign concept. That's not even counting the more subtle things that we don't hear about in the news. So I think assigning "racism" as a motivation is naive and looking for an easy criticism rather than trying to intellectually wrestle with the very real complication of having standardized globally interconnected communication networks while at the same time having geopolitical conflicts (and all of the things which stem from that).
This is Chinese as in China, not Chinese as in the race/ethnicity.
If they meant to demonize all people of Chinese descent, I would agree, but that isn't the case. This isn't targeted at Singapore, Taiwan, or any other country that might have a significant ethnic Chinese population.
It's nationalism, plain and simple. Still not great, but it's not what you demonize it for being.
I don’t see how the use of the word clean is racist. It is obviously playing to disgust sensitivity [interestingly, authoritarianism rises in the presence of infectious disease] but it isn’t obvious that ‘clean’ any more refers to ethnicities than it does to political, teleological or ideological world views.
That’s already the case. You have at least China’s Internet, Russia’s Internet, France is discussing ways to do the same, Australia seems to want to do it too, Thailand did some experiments a few years ago, etc.
Yet, no one seems to care what is unloaded from the ship docks, literally a "Port" where 98% of the goods are manufactured in one country including the entire supply chain that spans behind those goods.
> we'll have first internet countries (USA), second internet countries (China), and third internet countries (both)
This does not seem to be limited to network connectivity. The same balkanization is occurring with trade, movement of people, and defence spending as well. I would also say that its not as discrete as “USA”, “China”, “other” and is probably better expressed as “US aligned” when you start looking at nations who are already members of groups like N Eyes, EEA, Belt & Road, etc.
Im particularly interested in India. Will they be successful enough to create their own sphere, fall into US influence, or defacto continue as a large unaligned “other.”
> soon there will no longer be the one internet. There will internet one for the USA and the "west", internet two for China and the "east" internet.
Soon? How about years ago. The Great Firewall already accomplishes what you describe. You can't use Google in China, and you wouldn't want to use Baidu's censored search in the US.
As a US Citizen on the West Coast, my unadvertised research servers have been harassed by PRC IPs and others, without fail, for a decade+. I am not at all associated with the US Federal Government, and do not practice partisan politics.
All I know is, I have done nothing myself to PRC China, yet my basic linux and BSD setups are daily refusing all kinds of stupid and smart hack attacks via the Internet from that address range.
There are many old computers in China that have not security upgrades, so there may be a large botnet. Chinese IP does not mean that the attack come from China.
As a non US Citizen, not living on US soil, my unadvertised research servers have been harassed by, well, everyone, including US servers for years as well. C'est la vie.
eg. I set up a new domain a few days ago & within a short period of time, the first two IP's to run sniffers on it were US based (Arizona and Illinois, IIRC).
eg. A server I set up a few months back was getting hammered on an alternate SSH port, primarily by US servers. (Admittedly, there was a mis-configuration on my part which had the port responding to anyone but me in the first place)
Pot. Kettle. Black.
As time progresses, the ongoing war of of 'openness' vs 'sovereign rights' when it comes to the internet has only escalated, and will obviously continue.
Mr Trump's decision has clearly favoured the Chinese method of 'sovereign rights': countries and regional zones will be increasingly demanding dominance of their feifdom (such as GDPR vs Chinese wall vs Australian AAA "Assistance & Access Act" vs California's CCPA).
How should tech respond? It's either the web should be un-splittable, or infinitely splittable. We all know it's 'self healing'... but only to the limit that state level access allows it.
Some would say the easiest solution would be a de-escalation of the network centralisation that the web has: AWS, GC, Cloudflare, FB, Twitter. But, the (ironic) concept of "federation" that exists (Mastodon, NextCloud), only makes a single server cluster easier to be sliced off.
Either way, a single voice can be cut off by state level/mega corporate, whether it be a centralised system or federated, far too easily.
That even Mr Trump is getting tweets and FB posts 'moderated' is a sign that centralisation by corporations is definitely a problem.
Curious about the downvotes. Do people believe that this curtailment of freedom can't happen in America? I know people already rushing to prepare for it.
Or perhaps they believe that it will happen, but that it's a good thing?
Or perhaps, as is increasingly common, they believe both simultaneously: "China's firewall restricts freedom; our copy of it promotes freedom."
I hate the name, even the colonial imperialist associations with Cyber Monroe Doctrine sound more diplomatic than Clean Network. This literally sounds like an intellectual purge. Maybe because it is. This is a very purge-y purge name for a purge.
I guess we've officially thrown our hat into the ring for digital sovereignty and cyberpopulism. I wanted some decentralization but not like this.
I'm just upset that China gets Great Firewall and Russia gets Digital Iron Curtain and we get... Clean Network.
Is it too much to ask that we at least have better marketing for our authoritarianism?
Also, seems like a dated understanding. What happens when the Internet reaches comparable availability via satellite?
No wonder they want to test shooting missiles in orbit.
With EARN-IT, the H1-B ban, Clean Network, etc., I fear we're setting back our scientific and intellectual advantage several generations. The lessons of the Crypto Wars feel distinctly appropriate.
I'm certainly starting to feel the wind blow a certain direction.
Only the paranoid survive.
Satellite networks will always have lower data rates and latency than terrestrial networks from the extra complications of wirelessly sending signals thousands of kilometers into orbit and back. Even if you have global satellite access, the increased network demands from new applications like virtual reality, conferencing, and other uses we haven't thought of will naturally gravitate towards terrestrial networks. You'll have a fast terrestrial network that most people use in their everyday lives, and a slow satellite network used by people with special requirements. That's not all that different from how it works today with China's firewall, with most people content to live their daily lives inside and only a few putting in the effort to set up a VPN with lower network performance. You don't need to put up a 100% effective filter, just one that's annoying enough to get around that most people don't bother.
The name is an obviously racist play on the word "clean", because what makes something clean is no contact with the "dirty" Chinese. The Trump administration is not as literate as you suggest.
Welcome to the decline of the American empire. The ruling class is vainly attempting to preserve what it has by lashing out, but it's not even strong enough to do so militarily so it does pathetic moves like this. 70-80 years ago (pre-nuclear China) they probably would have just invaded and tried to reestablish 1880s colonial rule. I'm glad that the preeminent imperialist of the world is losing steam.
There are, especially when you look at the DOD/IC side of things. A lot of effort is being put into trying to reduce the risk of a a nontrusted or malicious supply chain (which ranges from issues like counterfeit FPGAs to hardware shipped with nefarious firmware)
Readit News
You see the same spin with immigration and trade restrictions. They are in fact a restriction of Americans’ freedom to trade and associate, but are always presented from the other angle (as a restriction on foreigners).
Or is it a name to troll CCP?
Is someone familiar enough with this to provide a source that discusses what "Clean Carrier/Telco/Store/etc" entails technically?
> Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.
Seems like the idea is to form a network that's "clean" of PRC influence.
It's hard to discern propaganda from the attempt to fight it nowadays, or maybe there never was a difference in the first place.
It's not about technology, it's about a business qualification for US telecoms and technology companies like Apple and Amazon. If they meet these standards, they're part of the "clean network" (which is just ugly obvious racism).
As a practical matter, this is dubious because there's hundreds of ways around these requirements bureaucratically. The value of this is the threat to China, that specific examples like TikTok can be chosen and banned; or that third parties like European businesses might move away from China to avoid jeopardizing U.S. business. This is just another front in the trade war.
There are blatant, obvious actions that the CCP has taken or sponsored which have negatively impacted the security and privacy of people who are not citizens of China and data sovereignty is not a foreign concept. That's not even counting the more subtle things that we don't hear about in the news. So I think assigning "racism" as a motivation is naive and looking for an easy criticism rather than trying to intellectually wrestle with the very real complication of having standardized globally interconnected communication networks while at the same time having geopolitical conflicts (and all of the things which stem from that).
This is Chinese as in China, not Chinese as in the race/ethnicity.
If they meant to demonize all people of Chinese descent, I would agree, but that isn't the case. This isn't targeted at Singapore, Taiwan, or any other country that might have a significant ethnic Chinese population.
It's nationalism, plain and simple. Still not great, but it's not what you demonize it for being.
and maybe a third type of internet for some countries which connects two both Internets (but maybe only one at a time?)
so we'll have first internet countries (USA), second internet countries (China), and third internet countries (both)
This does not seem to be limited to network connectivity. The same balkanization is occurring with trade, movement of people, and defence spending as well. I would also say that its not as discrete as “USA”, “China”, “other” and is probably better expressed as “US aligned” when you start looking at nations who are already members of groups like N Eyes, EEA, Belt & Road, etc.
Im particularly interested in India. Will they be successful enough to create their own sphere, fall into US influence, or defacto continue as a large unaligned “other.”
Soon? How about years ago. The Great Firewall already accomplishes what you describe. You can't use Google in China, and you wouldn't want to use Baidu's censored search in the US.
All I know is, I have done nothing myself to PRC China, yet my basic linux and BSD setups are daily refusing all kinds of stupid and smart hack attacks via the Internet from that address range.
eg. I set up a new domain a few days ago & within a short period of time, the first two IP's to run sniffers on it were US based (Arizona and Illinois, IIRC).
eg. A server I set up a few months back was getting hammered on an alternate SSH port, primarily by US servers. (Admittedly, there was a mis-configuration on my part which had the port responding to anyone but me in the first place)
Pot. Kettle. Black.
As time progresses, the ongoing war of of 'openness' vs 'sovereign rights' when it comes to the internet has only escalated, and will obviously continue.
Mr Trump's decision has clearly favoured the Chinese method of 'sovereign rights': countries and regional zones will be increasingly demanding dominance of their feifdom (such as GDPR vs Chinese wall vs Australian AAA "Assistance & Access Act" vs California's CCPA).
How should tech respond? It's either the web should be un-splittable, or infinitely splittable. We all know it's 'self healing'... but only to the limit that state level access allows it.
Some would say the easiest solution would be a de-escalation of the network centralisation that the web has: AWS, GC, Cloudflare, FB, Twitter. But, the (ironic) concept of "federation" that exists (Mastodon, NextCloud), only makes a single server cluster easier to be sliced off.
Either way, a single voice can be cut off by state level/mega corporate, whether it be a centralised system or federated, far too easily.
That even Mr Trump is getting tweets and FB posts 'moderated' is a sign that centralisation by corporations is definitely a problem.
Deleted Comment
Or perhaps they believe that it will happen, but that it's a good thing?
Or perhaps, as is increasingly common, they believe both simultaneously: "China's firewall restricts freedom; our copy of it promotes freedom."
Sadly, I think there are a lot of people who would believe that.
I guess we've officially thrown our hat into the ring for digital sovereignty and cyberpopulism. I wanted some decentralization but not like this.
I'm just upset that China gets Great Firewall and Russia gets Digital Iron Curtain and we get... Clean Network.
Is it too much to ask that we at least have better marketing for our authoritarianism?
Also, seems like a dated understanding. What happens when the Internet reaches comparable availability via satellite? No wonder they want to test shooting missiles in orbit.
With EARN-IT, the H1-B ban, Clean Network, etc., I fear we're setting back our scientific and intellectual advantage several generations. The lessons of the Crypto Wars feel distinctly appropriate.
I'm certainly starting to feel the wind blow a certain direction. Only the paranoid survive.
Unfortunately there's no much English reference for it, but https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E6%89%AB%E9%BB%84%E6%89%93... is a Wiki page in Chinese.