China and the United States once acted like opposites when it came to governing the internet.
Beijing imposed a heavy state hand. It blocked major foreign websites, sheltered Chinese tech firms as they developed alternatives to Western rivals and kept a tight grip on what people said online. The United States stood for a global openness that helped a generation of internet Goliaths dominate worldwide.
But when President Donald Trump issued executive orders that could lead to a U.S. ban next month on two of the world’s most popular Chinese-made apps, TikTok and WeChat, the White House signaled a new willingness to adopt Beijing’s exclusionary tactics. Trump went further Friday, ordering ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, to give up its U.S. assets and any data that TikTok had gathered in the United States.
On Monday, the administration also clamped down further on Huawei by restricting the Chinese tech giant’s ability to buy computer chips produced abroad using American technology. That followed a White House initiative this month to begin purging Chinese apps and telecom companies from U.S. networks, saying they posed a security threat.
Together, the moves herald a new, more invasive U.S. philosophy of tech regulation, one that hews closer to China’s protectionist one, though without the aims of censoring content and controlling the populace. The shift could hurt American internet giants like Facebook and Google, which have greatly benefited from the borderless digital terroir outside China, as well as Chinese internet giants like Tencent and Alibaba, which have tried to expand into the West.
If more countries follow Trump by basing digital controls on diplomatic allegiances, protectionist aims or new concerns about the security of their citizens, the internet could become more of a patchwork of fiefs as varied as the visa policies that fragment world travel.
“A wholesale ban will undoubtedly trigger retaliation and may contribute to the type of fracturing of the internet that we have witnessed in recent years, and which authoritarian governments favor,” said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
China and the United States have different starting points when it comes to governing high-tech industries. The Communist Party has no tolerance for its citizens speaking out against it online or organizing outside its sphere of control. It has also made no secret of its ambitions to cultivate Chinese companies’ expertise in advanced technologies, which foreign competitors say sometimes leads authorities to give local firms unfair advantages.
The White House orders on TikTok and WeChat, expected to take effect Sept. 20, were framed as measures to defend American citizens against the threat of data gathering by Beijing. They also appear to stem from the idea that China should be punished in kind for violating democratic norms. This principle of reciprocity has guided the Trump administration’s recent confrontations with Beijing over trade, industrial policy and the news media.
Yet when applied to internet governance, reciprocity could carry a heavy price for the United States. While few countries have fully embraced China’s walled-garden approach to cyberspace, many governments are uneasy with the dominance of American giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon within their borders, and are considering new taxes and restrictions on their operations.
As the Trump administration cracks down on TikTok and WeChat, other nations may start to see their dependence on U.S. technology providers in a different light.
Already, Vietnam and Turkey have tightened control over American social media. Across much of the developing world, Chinese software and social media companies have a good shot at beating out Western ones, Deibert said. China has worked for years to expand its influence in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and Chinese smartphone and telecom equipment makers have already won footholds there by focusing on providing the lowest-cost gear.
A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said in a statement that the administration was “committed to protecting the American people from all cyber-related threats to critical infrastructure, public health and safety, and our economic and national security.”
A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, this month called Trump’s executive orders “nothing short of bullying.”
Wang did not address China’s own restrictions on American websites, saying only that other countries might begin using national security as an excuse to act against U.S. companies. “The United States must not open Pandora’s box, or it will suffer the consequences,” he said.
China’s digital cleaving dates to the late 1990s, when it began constructing the Great Firewall, a sophisticated set of internet controls. Viewing the internet inside China as an issue of national sovereignty, Beijing heavily censored online content and over time blocked Google searches, social media like Facebook and Twitter, and news sites including The New York Times.
Behind that wall, Chinese internet companies like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, the maker of WeChat, thrived on a huge captive market. But China also tried to play it both ways as these companies began expanding into regions such as Southeast Asia and Europe.