Tech firms ban may boomerang on US

NEW YORK-As US President Donald Trump threatens to ban popular apps including TikTok and WeChat, "the United States may lose in Trump's TikTok war", an expert has said.

Wei Shangjin, professor of finance and economics in the Graduate School of Business and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, said forcing TikTok to be sold cheaply to a "very American" buyer will endanger many US firms in the Chinese market.

"If China were to mimic Trump's gambit－alleging, without providing evidence, that some US multinationals are potential national security threats－it could force them to sell their operations to 'very Chinese' buyers. Although the Chinese government has not yet done so, the risk has become higher now," said Wei, who was chief economist of the Asian Development Bank between 2014 and 2016, and whose opinion piece was published by Project Syndicate on Thursday.

That day US President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning any US transactions with the Chinese technology company Byte-Dance, owner of TikTok, starting in 45 days.

TikTok has been downloaded more than 175 million times in the US and more than 1 billion times worldwide, according to the executive order, which says the app automatically captures "vast swathes of information" from its users, posing risks to US national security.

A similar executive order has also been issued for WeChat, the messaging and social media app owned by the Chinese technology company Tencent.

Although the actions by Trump could yield a short-term gain for the US, they also hold potential risks to US interests, not to mention international and domestic rules of commerce, Wei said.

"After all, what would happen to business confidence if governments assumed that they could extort private enterprises at will?"

Trump is essentially doing what the US has long accused China of doing, disrespecting private property, presuming guilt without evidence, eroding foreign firms' legitimate rights without compensation, and using arbitrary, opaque rules to block them from operating in the country, Wei said.

"There is still time for the Trump administration to change course and avoid damaging US interests. But the clock is running－tick tock."

'Egregious' example

Russia's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that US efforts to clamp down on TikTok are an "egregious "example of unfair economic competition for US dominance in the international information space.

"The actions of the US authorities run counter to the basic principles of a free-market economy and violate rules of the World Trade Organization," a ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said in a commentary posted on its website.

These restrictions have violated a wide range of Washington's international obligations to ensure the free and wide distribution of information, the free choice of its sources, and to encourage collaboration in this area, Zakharova said.

Moscow is calling on Washington to reconsider its methods to preserve the monopoly of US IT companies in international social networks and ensure they meet generally accepted values and international legal norms, she said.

"We hope that specialized international structures and human rights organizations will react appropriately and give an impartial assessment of these actions."

After Trump's move, the US company Facebook launched an app called Reels, with features almost identical to those of TikTok, sending up the value of Facebook's stock 12 percent on Thursday and Friday and putting the net worth of the company's co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg above $100 billion.

National Public Radio in the US reported on Saturday that TikTok could sue the Trump administration over its recent executive order as early as Tuesday. TikTok's lawsuit will argue that the order is unconstitutional because it did not "give the company a chance to respond", NPR reported.

Xinhua - Agencies