The US Used to Demand the Best Tech. Now We Ban It

Cars and solar panels get hit the hardest with tariffs and restrictions.

Solar panels: [1]

Cars: [2]

More devices are being hit by US digital sovereignty rules. Most US talk about this revolves around the EU not allowing processing of data about EU citizens outside the EU. It's now a big issue for US customers, too. The US is applying it to many classes of devices. For cars, there's the “Connected Vehicles Rule”.[3] Cars can't phone home to China or some other countries. New models of DJI drones are not allowed to be imported into the US, as mentioned in the article.[4] WiFi-equipped routers have even tighter restrictions.[5]

Will this be extended to phones? "Smart" TVs? That's going to be interesting.

[1] https://www.peacocktariffconsulting.com/solar-panel-imports/

[2] https://motorwatt.com/ev-blog/howtos/importing-a-chinese-ele...

[3] https://www.hoganlovells.com/en/publications/us-bis-final-ru...

[4] https://uavcoach.com/dji-ban/

[5] https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...

US bans are based on the incorrect idea that we have control over AI. But the ban only reduces the most advanced model available from US companies. Models from other countries continue development. It's as if the US decided to hit pause on competing on AI and we're just going to let someone else win it.

The US could be using these models to fix bugs and defend out systems.. but instead, we're all waiting for open source models to exceed the best unbanned model available in the US(0), and then we can all watch while attackers -- who can use any available open source model, including banned models -- to attack every US company on the internet.

US bans are a choice: a choice to lose to China; a choice to leave US companies defenseless; a choice to reduce competitiveness of the US in software. Every time a US person or company watches someone use models they are prohibited from using to achieve something US models can't, they create opposition to this ban. I can't imagine this is a sustainable policy.

0. Currently open source models are included in consideration for the "best model in the US" -- but if they're willing to ban the best from Anthropic/OpenAI, I wouldn't necessarily assume that all open source models will always be available within the US.

I don't understand the surprise in this article. This particular story is absolutely nothing new—the Germans and Japanese did it first to the US car market, which is inefficient, stuck in a bygone era, and propped up by government protectionism. Nearly all* American cars have been backwards in all metrics since about the 1970s.

In general, if you wanted...

Reliability: Japanese. Value: Korean, French, Japanese. Performance: German, Italian, maybe every now and then British. Luxury: German, Italian, British, and depending on marque, Japanese.

And today, Chinese marques are eating everyone's lunch on every metric in the EV sector because they have seen how everyone else builds cars, lorries, and buses for a while, learnt how to do it themselves, got rid of the ICE, popped a battery in them, and have been massively undercutting the market for a while now.

* I should qualify this properly to pre-emptively stave off the ooh-rah crowd: every now and then there has been a decent A-to-B car out of the US, like the Fiesta. Additionally there are models sold purely in Europe like the Ford Mondeo.

>Americans watch the rest of the world getting better, cheaper, ...

If we wanted cheap cars, there needs to be demand to justify building giga factories of EVs.

There just wasnt sufficient consumer demand to justify the giga factory investments

China CAN generate demand for EVs because they have the political ability to

1) force gas restricted cars to only drive on certain days of the week

2) create a brutal lottery to get a license plate to legally drive a gas car

3) provide a bunch of subsidies

The US has only done option 3.

Out govt system literally doesnt have the political will to do these brutal but effective policy changes

I've been thinking for a while that some part of the ebullience towards AI among the American decision-maker class is that it is a good way to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like super-intelligent AI will make up for not being able to build competitive cars and drones. It has the feeling of an easy-to-digest explanation but I'm worried that it's probably wrong.

Journalists used to decry the use of LLMs. Now they use it freely to write their own articles.

The WTO was a mistake. We should return to a GATT style trade policy where free trade is allowed (mostly) between open democratic nations with aligned security interests and goals.

> China increasingly resembles the competitive capitalist system Americans were taught to admire, while the US appears to embrace the controlled “kickback” economy we were told to fear.

Spot on

I've said this before and I will say it again. I don't see any problem in allowing Chinese cars in the US if China manufactures them here under a 49:51 joint venture with an American company.

Also, I'm not sure how long CCP will keep on bankrolling their car companies. They are now competing with each other pushing the profits lower. Over the last year BYD stock is down 40%. Take a look at their auto manufacturers index. It peaked in November 2021 losing about 47% since then (https://www.solactive.com/index/DE000SLA0CA9/)

Opening the way for foreign competition.

Still the best place for Clean, Beautiful, Coal. Can't argue with that.

To play devil's advocate, there is some logic to banning Chinese cars, which is that their firmware risks sending telemetry to China, also disabling/malfunctioning the car if China were to have a military engagement with the US. I suggest a middle road which is that the entire telemetry surface and firmware updates must be domestically managed, with no room for a closed-source foreign entity to manipulate it.

An EV really shouldn't be needing to send telemetry at all. It's not a self-driving car. It would be better if the user could reliably and permanently disable it even when one's phone is connected.

The vehicle would also have to be tested to ensure that no covert or p2p radio signals can be sent to it that can signal it to shutdown or malfunction. This is very difficult to assert. There would have to exist domestic personnel who take responsibility for it.

Frankly though, Israel scares me more than China, as Israel is known to actually add remotely detonated explosives to exported consumer products.

It’s been like this for a while. Take a technology, call it a weapon and control it. Same playbook.

Umm not when the adversary is using heavy government subsidies to undercut prices and essentially take over the industry. Look at what’s happening to the European car industry, with more job losses planned by VW just this week