US tech curbs and China's AI success hold lessons for us

Technology denial regimes often spur self-reliance, as seen in AI, and India must indigenize advances too

- RAHUL MATTHAN

Laws are almost always designed to be broad, aimed at addressing a range of different issues. However, governments sometimes deviate from that approach, enacting targeted legislation aimed at narrow outcomes. The problem is that even though lawmakers come to this process with a clear sense of what they want to achieve, the outcomes of this approach are often not what they intended.

Take the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), a law designed to ban TikTok in the US. Once the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the law, ByteDance, the Chinese-controlled company that owns the viral video app had little option but to shut it down.

Long before the app went dark, TikTok content creators had started looking for alternatives. Many of them began to migrate to an app called Xiaohongshu (meaning Little Red Book) that was already wildly popular in China. It added over 700,000 new US users in just two days, making it the most downloaded free app on US app stores.

PAFACA had banned TikTok because US lawmakers were worried about the control that the Chinese government could exert on US users. But all the ban did was send those same users into the arms of yet another app, one that was, if anything, likely to be even more firmly under the control of the Chinese government. That the app is named after a book by Mao that is the very embodiment of the Chinese philosophies that the US government stands so firmly against, is a particularly delicious irony.