This proposed action just sounds like more election year grandstanding that will reduce American consumer's freedom to choose while having little practical effect on actually improving any national security that matters or can't otherwise be worked around. If it becomes law, the most likely outcome is that DJI becomes a US-based and owned company to whatever extent the law requires. The enterprise itself is too valuable to just shut down, so it's basically a government forced transfer of an asset. Being a forced sale, DJI's valuation will be substantially depressed. This will harm the Chinese entrepreneurs who started DJI as well as their investors but only indirectly cause relatively inconsequential damage to the overall Chinese stock market. To whatever extent Chinese intelligence is harvesting DJI drone data, there are other ways they can get that data ranging from LEO satellites to hiding imaging/sensor packages on any of the thousands of China-based passenger, cargo and private jets that overfly the U.S. weekly. Thus, any actual net improvement in national security posture is relatively minor at best.
It's frustrating because even if we grant there's significant national security harm happening from DJI drone data, there are far more direct and effective ways to mitigate any such harm. For example, mandate that consumer drone data acquired in the U.S. cannot be stored in or transit China without a license. At the same time reverse the new FAA requirement for drone manufacturers to install software remote kill switches on consumer drones. While the idea may have sounded vaguely appealing in concept, in practice it's been a huge hassle for American consumers while being ineffective as a security measure because it's so easy for bad actors to work around. Thus, the only remaining effect is the unintended consequence that it forces U.S. consumers by law to accept the anti-feature of drone makers being able to kill American's drones at will - including foreign owned companies.
And yet people tell me to "reform the system" instead of advocating to alternatives to the pathologically centralizing and ever daily more despotic USG.
We thought China would join the WTO and "Westernize" themselves. They didn't, and it's clear they're trying to come out on top. That's why the West is switching to full-on contagion mode.
The pandemic was the trigger event that gave us the activation energy to accept supply chain disruptions and ease into the pain of decoupling. It'll go much faster now. The de-China-fication is going to accelerate rapidly.
The game is now near-shore, friend-shore. Mexico is now the biggest trade partner of the US, and it's still only ramping up. The rail and truck corridors are growing significantly and we're about to pour in huge infrastructure investments.
It is pretty much game over for America now. Huawei has 2nm chip and will mass produce next year Q1. China EVs already so far ahead that Tesla had to mass layoff and price drop. Chinese drones are so numerous, even American Naval Admiral scared to engage Chinese. There are simply no simulation path of American stayimg ahead in next 100 years. Unlike Japanese, Chinese wont do Japanese kowtow. The best way forward is American get their budget in order. Once Chinese achieve full domestic consumption game over for America. Now Chinese has wodld biggest auto market 30m, bigger than USA and EU combined. Imagine that happen to planes, everyday consumptions. China also massive purchasing and delivering physical gold to Shanghai. Therr is no way USD and American economy able to sustain itself when Chinese outcompete, outspy, out militarise America. If you look at Chinese space station vs American ISS, you will know who will become star trek first. Even Chinese desert turning green will likely trigger dust bowl in America in the next 30 years. Game over America.
Millions of Americans are relying on the savvy actions of a couple tens of thousand investment brokers to ensure that when they retire they will be able to live closely to the manner in which they have been accustomed.
We have so defiled the American dream that if psychological or ecological terrorism on a scale large enough to alter the course of life on planet isn't allowed to continue unabated and increase its cataclysmically planetary destructive activities over time then all of our grandparents will starve to death homeless in a ditch somewhere and possibly us along with them.
While I certainly agree capitalism's excesses have led to the planets ruination, I would disagree that it's due to following "the american dream". (I always hated that phrase actually, it's much mor eimportant to face "reality" than to "dream")
Elon and Bozo being worth multi-multi-billions has nothing to do with the pursuits of millions of people.
The crime I would put on the millions is being intentionally oblivious to it all.
For example, thinking that people communicating on a proprietary corporate s/w platform constitutes a "community", or a "friend". This especially includes the gun porn "community" who think rolling around on the ground in their cammys is their version of "the dream".
Both China and the US are walking on a Cliff's edge here. Apple being locked out of China would be very damaging to the company sure, but Apple (and other major Electronics OEMs) are already moving rapidly to exit China as a manufacturer. China can only pull a few threads at a time, or it risks its economy collapsing - and just as its middle class is starting to settle in.
You're wrong. Apple is actually increasing reliance on China. Their India push is failing and they've increased Chinese company suppliers in the last year by about 10%.
And put 5 million jobs at risk? Banning Apple products would have wide repercussions to the Chinese economy and would directly strengthen its rivals like India.
Sorta feels like that's the direction things are headed anyways. China wants to bolster their own tech market and make themselves look strong without any foreign reliance. If you give Apple a choice between China or the rest of the world, they're not going to pick China for manufacturing favors anymore.
It's probably not China's preferred option, but whether they like it or not there's going to come a point where business relationships reach a tipping point and Apple will have to pick sides.
> If you give Apple a choice between China or the rest of the world, they're not going to pick China for manufacturing favors anymore.
> It's probably not China's preferred option, but whether they like it or not there's going to come a point where business relationships reach a tipping point and Apple will have to pick sides.
If you make Apple choose, they're probably going to get fucked, because (at this point) they can't not pick China: they're too invested and too dependent.
I read a long-form article maybe a year ago that talked about how Apple's efforts to reduce their dependence on China haven't been very effective.
But personally, I think forcing them to choose would be the right call. Tanking their share price and forcing them to burn their savings trying to save the company would send a strong message.
They could burn 200% of their savings and not make a dent: there would be no trying to save the company, most likely they'd just close up shop. For example, here's Tim Cook talking about the depth of China's labor pool in tooling engineers[1]. Basically saying that in the US, as an example, you could gather all the tooling engineers in the country and maybe fill a room. In China you could fill multiple football fields. For manufacturers, decoupling from that talent pool would take a multi-generation government-backed effort to train a minimal amount of domestic labor. It's not going to happen in a couple election cycles.
The company could persist, it would just have to look different. Apple's growth was not natural, enabled by high-margin hardware sales and high-volume service revenue. If both of those are going away, they need a pivot towards low-risk products that customers actually want to buy. More iPod and less Vision Pro.
It would be remarkably sad if America's largest tech company was rendered non-functional without Chinese labor to exploit. If Apple's fate is to close up shop without anticompetitive levels of market control, I guess they deserve what's coming to them.
Yeah, but the actual cause of the problems to retirees wouldn't be "the market", it would be the actual harm to the global economy. At a macro level a 401k is a small slice of the economic pie, and their values are just a reflection of the economy at large - if your 401k value tank, it's either because the economy is also tanking or because your 401k's portion of the total pie is shrinking.
I mean, Chinese electronics are everywhere. What's the specific threat here? I doubt DJI can easily exfiltrate HD video streams directly off of these drones. I'd be more concerned about their apps, cloud stuff and similar.
Instead of banning the communist hardware they could require open standards/access for interfaces, firmware and so on. Then again, sharing code does smell a bit like communism too. So let's better err on the side of freedom and ban everything.
cloud based, calling home, telemetry, video/radio surveillance, logistics exfiltration. Pretty much same arguments as in case of Chinese port cranes sending video feeds of sensitive shipments/port operations back to China, except on a global scale with high margin of deployments in security scenarios (police/fire/rescue/inspection/military).
One example is current Ukrainian situation. China gets a feed of who/where/how/what and how successful from supposedly civilian hardware.
With the snap of a finger DJI can dedicate 100% of its production capability towards building weapons in such a scale that nothing can match it. The have the entire stack, from IP to hardware design, hardware production, software design, and they create the best drone hardware of its kind, and apparently also top-notch software. I wonder why that is not addressed, but rather the capability to spy around, specially after seeing how they can be used in the front lines by dropping or placing bombs below trucks.
Cutting all ties to China (in escalating trade wars) surely will hurt local development, too. You think there will be much practical education without cheap Chinese electronics?
Chinese economic influence is rapidly expanding all over the globe. In the long run, losing the US market will become less of a threat.
I'd say develop tech sovereignty despite Chinese competition. Even if it's expensive, because I think the alternative would be much more costly.
The US has a mature and highly diversified drone industry with excellent tech. It just isn't targeted at consumers, which is the market segment where DJI plays.
DJI does own the consumer segment, but they're also still usually the go-to brand for US commercial purposes as well. Their software and hardware reliability is leaps and bounds better than anything else on the market until you start getting into defense contractor territory.
Isn't it partly an artificial problem created by export regulations? US had soft-restricted civilian ownership of missile-related technologies by controlling exports and inflating prices. But none of it applies to DJI drones somehow, so it wins.
Should certainly apply to android, iOS, windows, and most modern american made automobiles, televisions, refrigerators?, and almost all consumer electronics that are net connected.
The collection and efiltration of personal data from the entire population is a national security risk.
I think Skydio was the main US alternative until they stopped making consumer drones. They can probably start making them again fairly soon if they're incentivized.
I guess they're still an alternative to DJI's commercial segment, but I don't know of any competitors to DJI for most of their consumer drones.
They are an "alternative", they abandoned consumer market because they were unable to compete on technology and unwilling on price. Even Ukrainians dont want them and prefer DJI.
You're right, it would be better if there was fair competition and we could let the market decide things. But that's not the status quo. The status quo is one party (China) has extremely protectionist policies and encourages IP theft from other countries. Because of this, companies in other countries are at a disadvantage competing in the Chinese market and against Chinese companies. So then you have to decide: is letting Chinese companies win the competition via unfair practices better or worse than engaging in tit-for-tat and levelling the playing field a bit?
Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product. If domestic companies require patronage from the state in order to remain in business, they should not exist, no matter the conditions in some other jurisdiction.
> Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product.
In times of good economies, open borders, and peace, it might. But it also incurs significant risk if there are disruptions.
> If domestic companies require patronage from the state in order to remain in business, they should not exist, no matter the conditions in some other jurisdiction.
DJI and similar Chinese tech companies are benefiting from very significant protectionism, themselves. Should they not exist?
"Patronage from state" is a sensationalist way of putting us trying to avoid being overly dependent on a hostile dictatorship. Yes, the consumer will pay more but in this case it's worth it. It's like paying more for something because of insurance costs.
`Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product.`
So do lots of other things, and you need to balance competing sources of harm against each other. Allowing foreign companies benefitting from protectionist policies drive domestic industries out of business leaves consumers vulnerable to several other harms. You can't just do everything in a vacuum without considering the context because it's the "right thing to do" and expect the best outcomes.
DJI, in particular has a bunch of phone-home kill switch stuff built in. The FAA mandated a lot of it, and now I think they realize that, in practice, that means they're mandating that the Chinese military has indirect control over drones operated by Americans on US soil.
I think it'd be better to ban remote kill switches and instead mandate GIS databases that warn you if you're violating airspace restrictions (for drones over a certain size, where this isn't adding a bunch of complexity).
Shielding domestic drone manufacturers from international competition essentially guarantees that we'll fall behind China. That will cause a national security issue worse than the current situation.
Sometimes I wonder if the regulators are intentionally screwing the US over, or if it's just that the federal government has become unable to coordinate the actions of its own agencies.
edit: The sibling comments are great examples of why we need strong privacy laws. If it was illegal for DJI to exfiltrate the data the drones gather back to their manufacturers, then those classes of national security issues would take care of themselves, and the rules would solve the problem for all industries, not just this one company.
Definitely a DJI thing since the Autel is way, way less restricted. I got annoyed that a few little barely-used airstrips seemed to enforce limitations on the entire county.
That's not really a fair assessment of the situation. The real (and valid) concern is that DJI's commercial products dominate the market for land/resource development, agriculture, infrastructure, chemical refining and pipelines, and other segments, and the software platform is capable of exfiltrating data (flight telemetry, imaging, etc.) back to a firm with strong ties to Chinese government and state enterprises.
My concern isn't about competition but that since the drones dial home and get over the air updates, there's little that would prevent China from using it to gather images and location data that that we wouldn't want them to (private/commercial/military).
Why not ban that, then? Similar to concerns re: TikTok propaganda, it seems like the solution is not to solve the problem but to try and limit the bad things to being done by American companies.
This applies even more to teh chinese EV import bans.
It seems if the USactually wanted people to drive EVs and put photovoltaic on their houses that they would embrace Chinese government subsidized products. Why wouldn't we want the Chinese subsidy to advance the US's electrification?
WRT the the security vulnerabiliters, this is just another case of protecting US surveilance companies.
A law to ban all user data collection and exfiltration would be the most benificial to the population, but I think goggle would have a few complaints.
The US federal government's hostility towards DJI is tangential to its hostility towards drone operators in general. There are real national security concerns about the ability for DJI's devices and software platforms to exfiltrate sensitive data that could be used for military strategy, corporate espionage, or even things like gaining unfair advantages in real estate and infrastructure development deals.
It's interesting how advocating for backdoors into consumer products (like the US wanted DJI to do) suddenly makes you uneasy that there are other backdoors into those products.
I don't like Apple, but this was exactly their argument against putting in backdoors to unlock people's devices, and I support them in that.
This makes me worry that BambuLab might be up on the list too. Any Chinese-owned company becomes a risk. Not necessarily from an actual surveillance/security/propaganda point of view, but it's hard to not view the TikTok ban as a little xenophobic.
It's weird to me that so many congress-people are convinced this is a existential threat, but nobody shares any meaningful evidence. It feels like the kind of situation where "We can't tell them to move the nukes out of ____ because then they'll know our capabilities to detect their nukes."
The difference between DJI and Bambu is that Bambu products aren't being used in contexts that convey potentially sensitive information about infrastructure, heavy industry, agriculture, or land development. Bambu has a place in the low end of the market, but anybody doing serious prototyping work in spaces that cross into 'national security' territory is relying on far more specialized and US/Euro-centric vendor ecosystems for additive manufacturing.
Have to say, I bought a DJI drone that I enjoyed, but then the app stopped working after my Android phone upgraded to a new OS version. Even months later, it appeared that DJI had made no effort to fix this issue (which clearly did not affect only me). There are open source apps, but the existing open source apps at the time did not control a specific unique and important feature on the drone I bought.
Elise Stefanik seems to be making a name for herself, but I’m skeptical this will go anywhere.
is the article simplifying something? The law mentions networks, but would a better word be bands or something? I’m not familiar with drones but I would think most of them do not use what you’d call a network.
Instead of actually producing/making anything in the last 20 years, America has focussed on worldwide destabilization and funding high-tech projects like uber, theranos, hyperloop, a tunnel in las vegas, the holocaust of Gaza, Elon Musk's ego and 10 thousand delivery apps. Mainly because contrarian VCs were busy trying to get some Saudi chumps to hold the bag pre-IPO and because the leadership is just a foreign sleeper cell - activated not on behalf of the working people, but on behalf of rent-seekers, financializers, and a certain foreign government.
Instead of competing, US thinks it can ban it's way to success.
what's the purported privacy risk/s to American citizens specifically with DJI's drones? or is this purely a matter of geopolitics? (TFA links to a paywalled NYT article on what seems to be this point.)
Good. So more people can stop pretending America is about freedom. Tired of this bullshit rhetoric. Military industrial complex gets richer by robbing other countries, and politicians get richer by robbing Americans.
It's 2024 guys. Capitalism won. You can stop salivating when you hear the word 'communism'.
Traitor Trump said this, sleepy Joe looked there, bad communist China will take freedom guns away... in 10 years American English will be fully memefied dum-dum talk.
This makes sense to me. Although DJI is not a propaganda tool like TikTok, it is still a national security threat. Who knows what they could be doing - like capturing surveillance footage and biometrics (facial recognition) or high resolution maps from across the country and handing it to the CCP. There is no need for the US to trade at all with China given they are an authoritarian government undermining US interests. We should be seeking a fast path to divestment and disrupt their foreign policy goals in places like Africa.
It's frustrating because even if we grant there's significant national security harm happening from DJI drone data, there are far more direct and effective ways to mitigate any such harm. For example, mandate that consumer drone data acquired in the U.S. cannot be stored in or transit China without a license. At the same time reverse the new FAA requirement for drone manufacturers to install software remote kill switches on consumer drones. While the idea may have sounded vaguely appealing in concept, in practice it's been a huge hassle for American consumers while being ineffective as a security measure because it's so easy for bad actors to work around. Thus, the only remaining effect is the unintended consequence that it forces U.S. consumers by law to accept the anti-feature of drone makers being able to kill American's drones at will - including foreign owned companies.