Chinese government didn't allow people in China to use US services (Google, Twitter, FB) and instead invested and marketed Chinese "clones" of these businesses (Tencent, Weibo, Baidu).
Now that the Chinese owned TikTok is such a desirable app to use in the USA, the US government is blocking it in a similar fashion.
Where have you heard the US government is blocking the app? The gigantic security issues have been because the US government doesn't block apps like this.
It can forbid government workers from using it on government-provided devices. This is sensible due to the capabilities for arbitrary code execution and the full permissions to the device the app requires of the user. Amazon has done that with their employees as well. But the US government doesn't have a Great Firewall. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't ban or block it.
Edit: Apologies. I mistook the unlikelihood of anything like this being effective as reason enough for no one (let alone the President) to make statements like this. I stand corrected.
It was a huge story yesterday that Trump has said he’s going to ban it.
And while it’s not clear exactly how they’d ban it, it certainly isn’t impossible. They could tell major telcos to block IP ranges. Or tell Apple and Google to pull the app. Everyone involved could just say no to the government but it’s not all that clear that they would.
Considering the government strong armed Google into not interacting with Huawei, and considering many other governments have done IP bans / app store removal pressure, I find it a bit funny that the original reply was saying "who said the government will block TikTok?", as if that wasn't news directly from the President's mouth
Fair point, however it was blasted all over CNBC and etc, maybe I need to read the news less and my programming reference manuals more as a better use of my time
