DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc.
It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
I don't trust DJI.
I was looking to replace my GoPro with the DJI Action, but their app was not on the Play-store. It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.
I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.
It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.
I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store, especially because their home market (China) doesn't even use the Play Store.
The iOS version of their app is Apple-approved and present in the App Store.
I do research in this space.
Their consumer apps are loaded to the gills with product-manager telemetry (tap/action tracing, etc., think Firebase/Flurry/whatever), and until recently they had a "sync flight logs" feature that would do what it said: give your detailed flight logs to DJI. It was opt-in, but it was easy to do by accident and many years ago there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.
They just removed this feature from US apps this week (too little too late, and too attached to reality and not attached enough to political pandering).
DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.
I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front, but sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware (this applies to US-based companies and US intelligence, too, of course).
However, their apps run on their own controllers are generally alright, and their enterprise apps run on their enterprise controllers in Local Data Mode are legitimately clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.
I fly DJI drones all the time using DJI RCs with network credentials forgotten, and I wouldn't hesitate to use one of these for consumer use. For the truly paranoid, use a burner email and a VPN to activate the drone.
I also wouldn't worry about using DJI Enterprise drones with the pro controllers in Local Data Mode for even moderately sensitive applications (infrastructure, law enforcement, etc.).
Of course I wouldn't use one for US military applications, insofar as it would be foolish to use any non-allied electronic device in this way.
ps - note that the analysis in the sibling comments are of older apps, DJI Go 4 and Pilot 1, not the newer flagship apps DJI Fly and DJI Pilot 2. The general theme (tons of dirty analytics platforms) remains the same, but the newer apps use more American platforms (Firebase, AWS-hosted proprietary stuff) rather than Chinese, and the "disable telemetry" and "disable data sync" options generally have fewer bugs now.
I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front
In China you cannot not be explicitly a CCP data-collection front.
China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data. They just go to DJI an get it. DJI has zero legal recourse if the CCP wants access to all DJI's stored data. Doesn't matter where that data is stored. Same thing for tiktok and why legislators are killing that too. You're a Chinese company? You ultimately work for the state. No discussion.
China is not the US. People need to stop fitting the way things work in the US to the way things work in China.
Edit: For the whataboutists: Yes, everyone is aware that american three letter agencies have backdoor access to every computer, broken RSA and AES, and control the USA's puppet government. Thanks.
To start: I do not trust the CCP, but my trust in the American legal system has been waning.
What's the legal recourse for a US Citizen served with a dodgy FISA-related subpoena/warrant?
Or if a government agency wants to purchase tracking data that includes my phone from a data collection agency? Say the state of Texas purchases geotracking data for app users who cross state lines.
Apple famously told the FBI to go pound sand when asked to help access an iPhone in an actual terrorism case (i.e. it wasn't about going after dissidents or journalists or anything), even though such help was definitely within Apple's technical power.
Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government?
There is a good book on the American surveillance apparatus Means of Control by Byron Tau. People are a lot more watched than they think.
The Apple example is well-known because it is an exception. Much more common is not only compliance but making an entire business out of selling private data to the government.
https://theintercept.com/2022/04/22/anomaly-six-phone-tracki...
It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.
It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.
This is exactly the sentiment I wanted to convey. I'd feel far more comfortable if we didn't settle for "at least we're not as bad as..." levels of rhetoric. Unsavory surveillance practices in one country shouldn't give us a justification to accept the declining status quo here.
Whataboutery has become increasingly common post-Patriot Act America, especially as surveillance technology improved in the smartphone, always-connected age.
It was common to criticize the USSR/Iron Curtain countries for encouraging citizens to spy and report on each other. Today, in the world after the 2013 NSA revelations, Ring.com cameras, Alexa smart speakers, bossware apps and Palantir, surveillance is a "market opportunity".
This thread is about China?
Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government?
Yes. We've seen the back and forth with e.g. Jack Ma. It doesn't happen as publicly because it's not such good marketing in China, but of course it happens.
Wasn't the result of this that Jack Ma disappeared for a while and when we reappeared he sang the praises of the government?
One of the results, yes. That's good marketing in China. What kind of things you see in the papers tells you something about a country operates, but not a whole lot about how much access TPTB are actually being given to your messages, which is presumably the thing you care about.
They sure did! They also (was it around that time? I forget...) pushed pretty hard for everything to be stored in iCloud, where coincidentally it's not protected by any of the on-device security and can (as I understand it) be legally requisitioned by the authorities. Happy to be corrected (with sources) if I'm wrong here but otherwise this seems very much on par.
Chinese companies are the government heh
Whatever slim you want to think your recourse is in the US, it is FAR better and broader than in the country that has uncounted mobile execution vans with zero available records of who is executed.
At least the US is trying to be a democracy, and has largely functioning checks and balances.
CCP is flat-out 'you cannot even talk or access information on things that make us look bad, such as Tibet or Tiananmen Protests' and 'make the wrong criticism at the wrong time and it is over for you'.
There is a MASSIVE difference. Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.
Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.
Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.
America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.
China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.
I was not talking about false equivalence about their economic status; I was talking about falsely equating or 'whatabout-ing' their human rights status.
And if you think that polls of life satisfaction are meaningful among a population who are forbidden to criticize their govt except in limited ways (e.g., local officials), I'd like to talk about some fantastic oceanfront land in Kansas...
Economy? Of course people are happier to have a change from abject poverty, but it is entirely based on unfair export trade practices and highly leveraged investments both official and shadow-banking. At this point both are extremely fragile as the democracies start to catch on and the over-leverage starts to work against it. Even the massively over-inflated official growth numbers have tanked. On the economy, I'd choose to be in the USA over China, no hesitation.
"Transforming entire continents"? You mean making extortionate loans to impoverished countries to build their own ports and extract resources? Again, that has limited runway as people figure out that it isn't such a good deal.
And I notice that you entirely avoided the human rights citizen security issue. Yes, the US has corporate over-harvesting of data, and govt agencies can buy and/or demand access to the data. We also have court processes. Meanwhile, China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world, and mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more, but there are no public records. Again, no contest, USA is massively qualitatively and quantitatively better.
Serious question, if you don't think so, why haven't you moved to China? I'm sure they'd welcome such an advocate.
China is still a developing nation. China is winning at the junior economic Olympics. The same way all the major 1st world economies dominated it when they were developing.
Come back and waive your victory banner when China has a $60k GDP per capita and has the current growth trends it does. It needs to increase its GDP 500% before that happens though...
my trust in the American legal system has been waning.
Why? We just watched a former POTUS and the current POTUS's son get convicted of felonies in courts with juries. Is there a better test of the legal system?
Yikes, you must not have been following the cases or know the laws very well if that’s your takeaway from those.
Why yikes? I followed the former POTUS's trial closely.
Ahaha, as opposed to the US where... 3-letter agencies don't bring evidence to a judge, they just go to google/meta to get it.
Pointing out obvious bad-faith hypocrisy is actually called "whataboutism", you're doing a hecking fallacy!!
This is absolutely a false equivalence.
Google and Meta choose to give the government all sorts of data that they're not required by law to give, because they don't see it as worthwhile to go to bat for their users. You can choose to use a vendor who will protect your privacy and demand full due process on the part of government requestors.
In China there is no due process and no choice of vendors who would demand it, even if they could.
In China you cannot not be explicitly a CCP data-collection front
Unintelligible.
Rewrite as “in China it’s very hard to avoid turning over data to the CCP.”
It's a written rebuttal mirroring the original wording. This is a common writing and debate style; please don't ask people to rewrite their posts when it is fairly clear what they meant¡
China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data
Do you think that e.g. FISA courts or the CIA kidnapping random civilians based on their name/watch type have a high threshold of evidence?
> China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data. They just go to DJI a get it. DJI has zero legal recourse if the CCP wants access to all DJI's stored data. Doesn't matter where that data is stored.
Is this an assumption or do you have first-hand knowledge of how this works operationally, in practice?
do you think that national security warrants and subpoenas actually stand up to evidentiary claims? it’s not like the US actually cares and does the right thing— it’s just force hidden behind “process”
I remember reading somewhere that all large companies in China are effectively state-owned, they basically always have a CCP member of the party on their board, which even the CEO is beholden to.
For the whataboutists: Yes, everyone is aware that american three letter agencies have backdoor access to every computer, broken RSA and AES, and control the USA's puppet government. Thanks.
You're deliberately overstating the issue, to the point of absurdity, to avoid legitimate criticism. Three-letter agencies do have a high level of access to this data, and in many cases that's because the companies involved just voluntarily hand it over (no need to get the courts involved). Even when the courts do get involved, these are secret courts where the decisions are classified, and in any case from what we do know they act as a rubber stamp anyway.
So, this is a matter of the US wanting access to that data in addition to, or possibly exclusive from, the CCP. Frankly, as I'm not currently under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party of China, I'd prefer they have unlimited access to that data as opposed to the US government, if I have to choose one or the other.
China is not the US
Not a very good comparison in terms of the state forcing companies to give out their customers' data...
Also love how, in your opinion, anyone pointing this out must of course be a conspiracy nut.
sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware
Isn't this mandatory given the restrictions required of them to disallow flying in banned areas?
You don't need to phone home in order to implement no-fly zones. All you need to do is download the latest flight restrictions, which could most easily be done anonymously.
So many things don't need pervasive surveillance and privacy violations... yet it seems everything does it regardless, from the largest social media down to the most insignificant bank or government app you need to conduct your life.
No; this functionality is actually accomplished in a reasonable way, with a local database stored on the drone and checked by the drone's flight control software, and exemptions granted by uploading a signed payload to the drone detailing an unlock region and timeframe.
It's also worth noting that these restrictions aren't government imposed in countries besides China, and aren't government-linked besides a request-based "please make this location a no fly zone" process - DJI basically just exported a Chinese concept with hope of building goodwill internationally, and the no-fly zones were invented by DJI from public land use data. That's why other drones don't have no-fly zones but are still allowed for sale, there are frequent mismatches between DJI no-fly zones and real no-fly zones (both false positive and false negative), and why DJI disabled their own no-fly zone feature in much of Europe earlier this year (European mandated no-fly rules passed the responsibility to the consumer instead).
No-fly zones and unlocks is exactly why we went over to Autel and I hope they aren't next.
What I heard (third hand knowledge) is that the DJI Android software stack can't handle AABs and for some reason it's easier for them to just get people to sideload instead of fixing their toolchain.
At least on some Android based dji products, the device os does not include Google services. If aabs are dependent on Google Play being installed, then this would be correct. Side loading is absolutely viable for apks, as are third party app stores. I am not an android developer.
what's an AAB?
there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.
clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.
Juniper also had a “small bug” in their implementation of the NSA-mandated Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator algorithm that just so happened to leak the exact number of state bits onto the wire required to hack any VPN connection.
I don’t know if you’re an optimist or just a kind soul, but the rest of us are jaded for good reasons.
A drone company has ZERO business collecting flight log information, in the same way my car manufacturer has no business knowing where I drive.
That their “finger slipped” and they “accidentally” made opting out harder should tell you something.
I fly over 55lbs drones for a living and they all have manufacturer black boxes, mandated by regulation, to say "A drone company has ZERO business collecting flight log information" is wrong.
I've never heard of such a law or regulation. Which country? Can you link directly to the government site where this is posted?
I haven't used a DJI drone since I got my Spark, so this is a few years out of date, but when I set that up the procedure was incredibly locked down and invasive. You had to install the app, which had to have full access to everything, and which had to have an active internet connection to update the drone firmware. So at the least, it was extorting your physical location, details of any wifi network, access to phone photos, and iirc a bunch of other stuff (like I said it was a few years). The whole way through the app took a very authoritative tone ("do X, do Y, you must do Z") as well. I used a dedicated second hand phone with no SIM card (after initial setup) but it was still uncomfortable and there's no way in hell I'd have allowed the app on my main phone. No idea what it's like now but I'd be amazed if it's more free or respectful of privacy.
I don't think they're a CCP front, and their actual core product engineering is amazing, but my understanding is that like any sufficiently large organisation in China (or any country, I guess) they must comply with government instructions.
Their newer drones support DJI RC[0] so you don't have to worry about installing their app on your phone and giving all the permissions. I use it with my DJI Mini 3 Pro, another advantage is that you don't have to worry about phone battery
Aw yes, a $15B company that is “lazy”
It is amazing how much leeway enormous companies can get by claiming ignorance or laziness.
What about consumer apps in Local Data Mode?
Overall what I'd say about DJI is that they seem to be earnestly trying to make their features work at face value.
That is, if you opt out of data collection, they seem to be earnestly _trying_ to disable data collection. Unfortunately their apps are a spaghetti monster disaster and it's very difficult for them to get things right, so DJI frequently introduce new features or libraries which contain telemetry they've forgotten to disable. In my experience they do this more often in consumer apps than enterprise apps. I think they might actually have some kind of automated testing or audit applied to their enterprise apps.
Whether this is a conspiracy to introduce subtle surveillance bugs or simple hardware-company-making-software incompetence is of course an exercise left to the reader's paranoia level.
Anyway, I just use DJI RCs and forget network credentials. This limits the DJI bug/malice blast radius surface area to an acceptable range to me, and that's the advice I'd give others, too.
Your post convinced me of the opposite of what you were going for; after reading it, I get even more of a feeling that DJI does shady things.
I wasn't exactly going for "DJI is great" - it's kind of funny that's how it came off.
My points were:
* DJI's use of Secneo on Android isn't hiding a "sendAllYourPhotosToTheCCPServerNow" function. This seems obvious but I've seen this take everywhere.
* However, DJI's apps are loaded with telemetry that's indistinguishable from malware. They ARE full of shady things.
* I wouldn't run a DJI app on my own phone.
* I would use a standalone DJI remote for most low to medium assurance applications, because while the shadiness remains in many ways, the threat model is easy to understand and boundaries are pretty easy to draw.
I feel like you're underestimating the average large state actor's ability to employ subtlety when they really care about a long-term foreign intelligence operation.
For example, it doesn't have to be the case that DJI has ever been told to collect data for the CCP. That would be a big OPSEC violation — as soon as anyone in the foreign media learned of it, DJI would be as dead as Huawei or Tiktok.
Instead, it could just as well be that the CCP have left DJI themselves untouched, but have instead manipulated market conditions around them: arranging it so that DJI "just seems to never be able to" hire any security experts; and so that DJI (and everyone else) hire product managers from a pool trained on CCP-sponsored university programs and industry media sources, that have those product managers parroting "useful" beliefs like "more analytics is always better."
arranging it so that DJI "just seems to never be able to" hire any security experts
They're foot-nuking themselves this way, as well. Due to their poor security, DJI are also easily compromised by Western interests and collect a ton of data about Chinese drone operations. I suppose someone could argue they decided that this is worth the cost of the operation, etc., but it seems... odd.
hire product managers from a pool trained on CCP-sponsored university programs and industry media sources, that have those product managers parroting "useful" beliefs like "more analytics is always better."
The CCP don't need to do any work to make this happen. I totally agree that they benefit, thus my "indistinguishable from malware" comment. But this is how product management works worldwide. Maybe the modern obsession with product telemetry has been a years-long deep intelligence op, but I think it's easier to attribute to standard corporate behavior.
I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store
If that was the case, then why jump through all the hoops of extensive code obfuscation for the Android app? [0]
DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.
Leaving the door propped open for everyone is also plausible deniability for doing bad things.
Anti-reversing. Obfuscation and packers are dominant in Chinese applications. If something isn't obfuscated, it's free reign for competitors.
Leaving the door propped open for everyone is also plausible deniability for doing bad things.
We completely agree here, see "sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware." I personally don't think this justifies a blanket ban on a technology; if it did, the world would need to be a very different place.
This is a naive take Im wondering if its intentional disinfo.
I don't think "being in the Play store" means something is trustable, it just means you trust Google Play Services and Google with all of your data, and by extension, the US government.
Being located in the US, I am arguably far more concerned about the US government tracking me than the Chinese government. The US government has jurisdiction over me, the Chinese government does not.
Being located in the US, I am arguably far more concerned about the US government tracking me than the Chinese government.
I read this BS so often that it feels manufactured.
Why BS? The US government can jail me; the Chinese government cannot. I therefore fear surveillance by the US government more than I fear surveillance by the Chinese government.
Now, in an ideal world, I want neither China nor the US monitoring me, nor anyone else. But for me personally, the downside from the US monitoring me is larger.
That line of reasoning seems sound to me. If you see a flaw in it, state what the flaw is, rather than just labeling it "BS".
It skips important details such as courts, juries, and due process. It's a cynical view that the US legal system must work the same way as in authoritarian Communist China.
It sounds like a view that someone living in such a system would have. That your system is equally bad but at least ours is across an ocean. Is it a false equivalence?
No, it's not false equivalence. You seem to be completely missing the point.
Let's say that there's a major terrorist attack that uses a freight train as a bomb. Let's say that it took very careful, long term observation of trains in order to gather the information that made the attack possible. Let's say that in response, Congress passes legislation that makes it illegal to loiter in a location where you can watch railroad traffic. But my hobby is watching trains, and I think "surely that can't be constitutional", so I keep doing it. Homeland Security looks at my location data from my phone and has me arrested. I go to court and the jury finds me guilty because that's the law and watching trains is a really weird hobby that none of them identify with. In a decade the Supreme Court rules that the law is unconstitutional, and I go free. Due process worked (eventually), but it still ruined a decade of my life.
Now let's say that instead, Chairman Xi gets paranoid and decides that it's dangerous to allow people to watch trains. He issues a decree to that effect. Also, he (or his intelligence services) can get access to my location data, and can see that I'm hanging out by railroad lines watching trains. And there's not a thing he can do about it - not without conquering the United States first.
So, no, it's not false equivalence. I absolutely value due process and jury trials. I'm glad I live in the US and not in China. But I also am aware that even in the US, law enforcement at times oversteps their authority and the rules. We have layers of protections, and those layers of protections usually work in the end (there are those who would accuse me of being blindly optimistic here).
But for all China's problems, and lack of democracy, and lack of due process, and all that, they can't jail me. The US is my problem; China isn't. (And keeping the protections the US offers is my problem - or my responsibility, if you prefer. Keeping protections against unreasonable search and seizure is part of that.)
I appreciate the explanation. The argument that China can't throw you in jail is technically correct but ignores all of the things that they can do to you. They won't throw you in jail they only seek to erode and nullify the West.
I'm not worried about jail as much as I'm worried about surveillance of my friends and family for profile building, blackmail, staging cyber attacks on power grids and water treatment, and harassing journalists to name a few. They can and are currently doing those things on a massive scale.
I also worry about those things. China (and Russia, and Iran) are definitely trying to "erode and nullify the West"; I worry about they succeeding. I worry that, at least in part, they are succeeding.
But as the saying is, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The West could erode itself, too - by giving too much ability to spy on citizens to the powers that be. The more power, the more it can be misused, and the more incentive to get in power it gives to someone willing to misuse it. I also worry about that danger.
This is an incredibly naive view.
State your reason - I'm in the same boat as dheera and I'm curious.
And also:
https://blog.quarkslab.com/dji-the-art-of-obfuscation.html
Discussed at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438842
Long ago I bought a DJI mavic. I generally don't use apps for any stuff.
I couldn't fly it with the joystick controller that came with it. It said "see app" or something on the controller. It was really annoying but I sent it back. A cursory web search said it was sending all kinds of location/flight information/etc back to dji continuously.
I thought there would be outrage, but not much.
I think it is sort of annoying that they are going after DJI specifically.
I think congress should be going after device/app privacy itself for all devices/apps in a more fundamental way.
I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.
Every Android in America is sold with a rootkit called Google Play Services and it can do absolutely anything on your phone. There is no limit to what Google Play Services can do on your phone unattended or clandestinely.
Do we know the official reasons they can't be on Play? All I can find are people speculating, but it would be really nice to know exactly what Google rejected them for.
Edit: Thank you sibling comment posted at same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40709374
This whole thing is about the trade war with China.
Attacking successful Chinese companies with pretenses.
Well, their app is on the iOS app store, so unless you imply they do something special for their Android app...
What is DJI, why is it being banned, and why should the general public care about this?
(In all seriousness, nothing I've read about "DJI" even explains the basics of the issue.)
If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. The US wants to encourage domestic drone manufacturing by eliminating the largest Chinese manufacturer as an option.
They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.
You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated factory if you're selling at a massive scale. Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.
And it's also dumb to fund your opponent's war production lines.
Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.
I anticipate exactly zero automated drone factories.
"automated factory" is somewhat redundant, no?
The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.
I am of the opinion that the US made a very serious mistake by opening up tariff-free trade with countries which do not have comparable labor and environmental safety laws. The Feds should have come up with reasonable estimates of what foreign manufacturing was saving by cheating that way, and charged them that amount of money to sell products in the US. Factories which wanted to avoid those tariffs could pay for, and submit to, an independent audit of their factories.
Instead we decided that it was fine for US manufacturing to compete on an "even" basis with nations who are fine with laborers losing fingers and/or getting paid slave wages, and manufacturers dumping their waste stream into a nearby river. We've paid a severe price for that misguided egalitarianism, and it's time to change course.
US made a very serious mistake by
Was it a mistake if the goal was to get cheaper products at the expense of foreigners losing fingers?
I agree it is myopic policy for the long term, but certainly many voters are happy to push safety problems somewhere else.
It is bad policy long term, and this policy has been around for a long time. At some point we need to address bad policy.
It was great for short term profit and stock value and everyone involved in making those choices is either dead or soon to be dead and doesn’t have to deal with the fallout.
As duties and trade restrictions were dropped in the late 70s and 80s, the mantra was that by doing so, the West would "uplift" poorer countries such as China. The goals to improve quality of life, transform the third world from agrarian to mass production, with a hope of spreading democratic principles as well.
And yes, over and over this was the desireded goal, I remember the election campaigns, the speeches, the white papers, the think tanks.
This has mostly been a success, looking at many such countries. The standard of living has gone up, for example China now has a "middle class" of sorts.
Environmental concerns were not on the radar at the time, not 50 years ago, not like today.
The intentions were reasonably positive and well founded. Of course, I agree reassessment is necessary, and it really should always be.
The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.
In the consumer market, if the $1000 drone has a significantly worse user experience then people just won't buy it. Before DJI the consumer drone market was much smaller; by creating a cheap, high-quality product DJI caused more people to purchase drones, growing the market. If there's no competitive alternative the market will just shrink again; consumer drones aren't a necessity.
By all reports, Skydio drones offer an excellent user experience.
The DJI Mini 3 Prop is currently $899, and Skydio can't manufacture something like that in the US, and sell it for that amount of money. But I bet they could make something comparable at a sale price of $1100-1300.
Allowing Communists to dump goods in our market is optional. I don't know that I support a ban on DJI products, I have a Mini 2: I like drones, but not enough to drop a couple grand on a Skydio 2 (and note that they exited the consumer market, presumably because of the aforementioned price dumping making it infeasible to compete). I would be pissed off if it was permanently grounded. But at minimum I support tariffs which are heavy enough to give domestic industry a chance to compete on an even footing.
And given the evident relationship between drone technology and national security, I could be persuaded that a full ban is in the national interest. Perhaps (this is only sort of a joke) the NSA could release a full open-source jailbreak of every DJI product, and publish an API for the cloud components which any American compute provider could then offer.
Then block their servers. Let 'em know that we'll let them back in the country when Facebook can operate in China, and not before.
At this point China is about as communist as FedEx is federal. They are “state capitalist” which pretty much means the government owns or has controlling stakes in a lot of companies. Singapore’s is similar.
They copied Lenin’s NEP, which was copied later by the German fascists. As it happens, Sun, Yatsen, on his deathbed, met with Mao one time in Guangzhou and they both agreed a fascist (or state capitalist) system would be best for the Chinese people. That was after NEP but before German fascists rose to power. Of course Stalin put an end to NEP and powered and willed full on communism after Lenin’s death.
The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get.
the time when the US could actually decide this sort of thing at close to planet scale is long gone. if you ban those devices, there will be countless other nations (including close friends of the US) where you will be able to buy them no problem.
I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.
Sure, but you won't be allowed to buy one for less than the cost of a small car.
which, the factory that builds drones or the drones themselves?
What would stop someone from building their own cargo container sized drone factory that takes parts like motors, pcbs, batteries in one end and spits out finished drones on the other?
Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.
I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points. Those 20-50k drones, I assume you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136?
The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.
I don't understand why every estimate assumes Russian and Iranian engineers work for free and only include the raw material/components cost of these weapons systems.
R&D costs makes up the vast majority of the cost of Western weapons systems.
They don't. The estimates are typically 3x-4x the cost of the raw materials. Besides, for these weapons it's the marginal cost that counts.
I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points.
I think you're 100% right here.
It may seem absurd, but something that can take out a main battle tank would be well worth $20,000. An M1A2 Abrams costs $24 million. The latest model Russian T-90 is around $4 million. A Chinese Type 99 is around $2.5 million. The asymmetry is clear.
Some of that $20,000 is making sure it works reliably under any conceivable weather conditions, after it's been stuck in a storage container at +50 C/-30C for weeks or months, etc.
On the other hand, if you're just doing reconnaissance, maybe you'd rather send a swarm of 20 $1,000 drones instead (in an attempt to overwhelm the enemy's countermeasures).
UA is showing the world what can be done with <$1k drones. China has that market locked down right now, presumably this legislation is aiming at that market. This isn't about Reaper-scale drones.
High volume single-use drones and DJI drones are almost completely orthogonal in terms of technology, production, and procurement. The only thing they really share is MEMS gyroscopes and brushless motor windings. Making a million FPV bomb drones and making a million consumer camera drones are such dramatically different tasks that there is not a chance this theory holds water.
You should look at see what kind of drones are dominating Ukraine's skies. You'd see some water being held. And you probably should have googled this before making this comment.
Most of the kamikaze drone videos I see use Betaflight OSD. DJI is kinda expensive for suicide missions.
I'm quite familiar with this space, thanks :)
DJI drones are being used in significantly lower quantities as "base stations" and long-range reconnaissance applications, with the occasional bomb-dropping side run.
FPV drones are being used in much, much, much higher quantity than DJI drones, owing to their massively lower cost to produce due to ... the simpler and mostly orthogonal supply chain!
Financing a consumer/enterprise camera drone production capability with an end goal of enabling the construction of large quantities of one-way FPV drones, as the parent post to mine suggested, would not be a good strategy, IMO.
Having domestic consumer/enterprise camera drone production capability at all is of course a good idea, but the quantity needed in war fighting is significantly lower, at least with the current tools and techniques seen in Ukraine.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry.
Single use drones could exist without subsidizing by the consumer industry. Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands. Anything else would simply lead to overdesign and basically the same problem we have now where the enemy is simply lobbing cheap artillery in volume while we simply do not have smart missiles to spare for Ukraine, nor for ourselves if we got into such a war. Lmao.
The American MIC is largely...maliciously incompetent. I work in this sector. Overdesigning, so you can slap a 500% profit margin on something with more features than ever needed. Then you lobby the generals in charge of project funding with dinners, gifts and more.
Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands.
I'm under the impression that the supply-chain for Ukrainian drones basically leads to China in the same way that it does for Russia. For a "small" regional conflict, this isn't a problem to Ukraine because there's no way China could or would restrict supply of their cheap drones. But for a large-scale conflict, it would be a problem for the US to not be able to source drone motors by the 10,000's.
The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale
But yet they have no trouble procuring single-use (by definition) artillery shells that cost an order of magnitude more and require even more production volume?
Except - they have. All Artillery Shell Plants in all NATO countries combined (minus Hungary, because f* Orban) are unable to produce enough shells just for the War in Ukraine. The US has completely gutted their manufacturing base, and currently won't be able to compete in a peer conflict on a ling term basis. Not enough shell and ammo production, not enough logistical capability, not enough ships, not enough dock capacity...
Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.
1. It is a bad idea to use national defense in this manner. There are more honest tools that can be used, see two.
2. Using tariff or other trade tools can blunt the impact of DJI's market position and allow for US entrants to develop. [0]
A weakness of both nat-sec bans and tariffs is that they don't actually do anything to encourage a company like Anduril to make the pro/sumer stuff needed for volume sales to develop broad acceptance, fast iteration and well founded supply chains.
0. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/03/larger-lesson...
I very much prefer my Skydio2 drone over any DJI product I've ever flown. Totally subjective experience. I got tired of fixing DJI drones.
Interesting, I have the opposite experience, mostly due to the camera/sensor quality.
I have 3 DJI drones. Not a single failure on either.
I have the last consumer Skydio model, and I'm thinking of selling it to buy a DJI. Skydio has way more intelligence, but the camera quality just isn't there. Footage is ok for social media and that's about it.
This is why Western drone startups keep failing against DJI. The consumer and prosumer drone market do not want AI-driven flying autonomous robots. They want high-quality cameras that can fly.
When the Western drone startups fail at that they will turn to AI, agriculture, LIDAR/mapping etc. But all the money is in the consumer/prosumer market where DJI is earning billions every year which also makes them able to outspend competitors in the professional drone markets.
If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war.
How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine?
Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?
How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine?
It will not.
Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?
No.
This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing.
This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing.
I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them? They would be getting drones built to order from a military contractor anyway, so I don't think it really matters what the leading consumer manufacturer of drones is to the US military from that perspective.
Chip manufacturing seems like a slightly different situation in that if another country restricted US access to chips it would affect the entire US economy, so I think it has security implications in a broader sense where security is interpreted to include the stability of the US economy as a whole, rather than military supply specifically.
I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them? They would be getting drones built to order from a military contractor anyway, so I don't think it really matters what the leading consumer manufacturer of drones is to the US military from that perspective.
They rather famously switched to an Xbox controller for their rolling drones, and for their submarine controls, because they just work better. For quite a while, military-issued camelbaks still had bright blue caps because the contract to custom build the systems hadn't been settled yet. There are in fact plenty of electronics that they use that are not purpose built, that are bought more or less off the shelf.
All of that said, I still agree that the US military is unlikely to allow off-the-shelf drones at this time. Parts availability is the driver there. Its better to pay a contractor $3k a pop to buy a bunch of a DJI Mavics, spray paint them olive drab, and issue them to each platoon than it is to give every platoon $3k and say "go buy a drone", because then you can buy 6000 of the same replacement rotor or whatever.
"I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them?"
Yes, because if you have no drone manufacturing in your country, you can't just spin on a dime and suddenly have military-grade drone manufacturing. Technology is a lot less about knowing what the atomic weight of cesium is and a lot more about employee A knowing that B knows how to solve instability problems and their contact at company C knows what to do when the blades spin apart. You can't build the massive networks of those relationship by just passing a law today and expecting to have a best-of-class industry tomorrow, no matter how much money you throw at it.
For whatever it's worth, the original Predator drones were mostly based on off-the-shelf parts. Wired had a great story on their history in 2016/7.
Ukraine goes through hundreds if not thousands of drones a day. Most are DIY or consumer grade at <$500 including warhead. Recent comments from DoD suggest their plan for defending Taiwan is hundreds of thousands of drones taking out any invasion fleet. At defense contractor prices that's a bitter pill to swallow even for the Pentagon. The M982 Excalibur (GPS/INS guided artillery shell) is ~$100k per boom. I largely agree a domestic supply chain for this stuff is important, even if Stefanik is ham fisted as always.
FWIW, we might be at peak drone for warfare anyway. At least vehicle based countermeasures are pretty obvious and will be put in place soon, although that won't be cheap either.
It has to do with spurring US manufacturers as the primary outcome. It’s not about affecting Ukraine in the short term or stopping them from being used against the US.
It will force western r&d and production to ramp.
Ah yes, $10k drones made in a different country's sweatshops. Not to worry, MURICA BRAND.
DJI arguably makes the best consumer camera drones on the market. Why ban them? Because they're Chinese probably.
Probably yes. The industry can fight with quality or price against Chinese bad products and non Chinese good products, but products that are both Chinese and top notch quality are going to dominate the market because of comparatively lower costs. Now, that law can indeed have some basis, in theory, but tailoring it to a single brand won't achieve much as the Chinese industry can rebrand products at a cost and in times that are a fraction of a fraction of what it takes to any western democratic country to adjust the law against another brand. On the other hand, they can't make a generic law against say suspicious code running on consumer devices that could be used to exfiltrate personal data, as it would potentially hit every connected device out there, including western branded ones. My impression is that they (the law makers) are almost facing the wall where they should admit that closed proprietary devices are generally unsafe and bad, but can't because it would hurt the same industry that contributed to their campaigns, so they direct all weapons against the external enemy. "We're good, they're bad", and end of the story.
I agree with your impression.
It reminds me.. when someone is cheating on a partner, they are more likely to think they are being cheated on too. I have experienced this, being accused non-stop when actually they were the one cheating all along.
Just because USA likes tampering with proprietary code and using NDA’s with Silicon Valley to bug just about anything they want (because they can), that paranoia consumes them that other countries are doing the same.
Just because USA likes tampering with proprietary code and using NDA’s with Silicon Valley to bug just about anything they want (because they can), that paranoia consumes them that other countries are doing the same.
During times of war, other countries absolutely do the same.
When you can't justify the actions of your country - but..but..but other countries they do the same!
Just looks at the western reactions about 'foreign agents' bill in Georgia.
Who said I'm trying to justify anything? I don't think it is justifiable to do during peacetime.
But obviously an existential crisis is not the time that many governments stand on their principles, which is why 'war powers' tend to be justified under extenuating circumstances when countries end up at war.
There is no question, if there is another major war between world powers, they will invoke the authority to compel their industries to cooperate with the effort. If they don't, they'll quickly cease to exist.
The industry can fight with quality or price against Chinese bad products and non Chinese good products, but products that are both Chinese and top notch quality are going to dominate the market because of comparatively lower costs
I think the sooner the west (read US/Canada and Europe, some say Australia/NZ) realized and wake up from their denial the better. Gone are the days of the narrative we're not going to export to you our superior and more expensive products, but now the narrative we're not going to import your superior and cheaper products, how the table are turning 180 degree. It's not uncommon to watch western Youtubers praising the good quality DJI products and at the same being critical of GoPro sub-par quality products, and they're not even reviewing the products but just honest remarks from professional users going about their filming and recording routines.
they can't make a generic law against say suspicious code running on consumer devices that could be used to exfiltrate personal data, as it would potentially hit every connected device out there, including western branded ones. My impression is that they (the law makers) are almost facing the wall where they should admit that closed proprietary devices are generally unsafe and bad
The issue is even bigger than that. It doesn't matter what the device does now, nor does it matter whether it is open or proprietary.
When it comes to national security, ask yourself "what could happen in a time of war?" Some obvious answers are:
1. If it connects to foreign service providers, those services could be shut off or changed to be malicious
2. If the device uses parts/support/updates from foreign service providers, those could be discontinued, or changed to be malicious
3. If you need the product, but don't make them locally, they may no longer be available.
etc.
This feels like rehashing much of the conversation about TikTok, and earlier Huawei.
It is a national security concern. Whether the cure is better than the poison only time will tell.
The consumer market has had it too good for too long.
Yeah, they have to suffer and pay through the nose. That'll teach them right
Drones are national security issues for two reasons -- one is that they could be used for surveillance domestically (similar problem with tik tok) and secondarily drones are now core warfare technology and the US has offshored so much of it's manufacturing capacity (not just for drones, but for all electronics) that the US is at real risk of losing any conflict with china because our supply chains will be absolutely wrecked if China cuts us off, so the US is trying to encourage more domestic production. I think China cutting off exports to the US would be way more devastating to the US economy than the US cutting Russia off from the world banking system was to Russia.
What is DJI
One of the largest drone manufacturers globally and backed by the Chinese government [0] and several Red Families [1]
why is it being banned
It is very closely connected with Chinese government stakeholders, with worries around privacy and data retention [2].
There is also some lobbying by Skydio and Andruil [3][4].
They are also breaking sanctions against Russia with Russian forces using their drones [5][6] (though the Ukrainians are using them as well), as well as sanctions around Xinjiang [7].
why should the general public care about this
They are a popular low cost drone option. It might also spark a rise in domestic drone vendors - especially in the industrial and defense space [8].
---------
Also, can we please have another source. DroneDJ is a DJI specific blog and as such is biased in favor of DJI.
Here's some reporting from AP - https://apnews.com/buyline-shopping/article/dji-drone-ban-in...
And the bill itself - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864
--------
[0] - https://ipvm.com/reports/dji-prc
[1] - https://tracxn.com/d/companies/dji/__-YU3B-qveVWiE0QN_8HPp2m...
[2] - https://info.publicintelligence.net/ICE-DJI-China.pdf
[3] - https://www.auvsi.org/policy-proposals
[4] - https://www.auvsi.org/member-organizations-list/all
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/business/russia-china-dro...
[6] - https://djirussia.ru/
[7] - https://ipvm.com/discussions/dji-xinjiang-human-rights-abuse...
This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway.
It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional election year virtue signaling designed to get some headlines and then be quietly negotiated away during 'reconciliation', yet congressional processes are so dysfunctional there's always a risk it accidentally becomes law.
Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage).
Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
We'll what happens after the first public vigilante action against a corrupt cop who got a paid vacation instead of a jail sentence.
But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though.
What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
They could put anybody who assembles those parts into a drone into prison. Of course it would still be technically feasible to make one anyway, just as it's technically feasible to make an autosear, or for that matter a whole gun. Doesn't mean it can't be banned.
If they weren't able to stop people from growing and distributing marijuana then I doubt they'll be able to stop this.
It takes minimal skills or effort to grow pot.
This is closer to banning moonshine which was arguably fairly effective.
Whoa there big fella. Let's not denigrate weed growers with your broad brush trying to a make a point. Anyone that believes growing pot takes minimal effort clearly does not know what they are talking about. Maybe you can just drop some seeds in the ground somewhere, and maybe a pot plant will grow, but good weed will not be a plant of any value what so ever.
Low effort doesn’t mean zero effort. 19 states legalized home cultivation and many people are perfectly happy with what they get with minimal effort. Even in states where they can legally buy a higher quality product.
not be a plant of any value what so ever
It’s long been a perfectly viable strategy to plant pot on public lands and then come back for harvest. That doesn’t mean people are tossing seeds randomly, but lower rewards are balanced by lower risks. Some customers are always interested in savings cash even for a terrible product.
My joke was to ask who is in charge, the pot grower or the plants? You get people who don't know personal hygiene, cant cook, cant run an agenda, cant read a book, cant pay their bills in time, cant keep a cactus alive. They cant do any of those things if their life depended on it. Then all of a sudden they are busy every waking hour doing all of those things to perfection and they talk like professors. Not to mention the possible consequences. If the plants had legs, arms, a brain and access to the internet they would be doing and thinking precisely the same things. Who do you think has the pants on?
True but some efforts are way beyond what is done in agriculture. They for example have been mutation breeding[0] since it was discovered on much larger scale than public efforts. The mutants check all possible boxes except taste. Grow faster, drinks more, more THC, resistant to heat and diseases, likes light 24/7 even while flowering, all the same size, no branches, few leafs, easier to clone.
Doesn't stop them from making marijuana illegal and putting people in prison, does it?
That said, I think enforcement would be more effective for drones. Marijuana can be effectively enjoyed in the privacy of your own home, but that's only true for a limited extent of drones. They're noisy and usually flown out in the open where annoyed neighbors can narc on you. Furthermore, just my subjective guess, I think people will be more willing to break the rules to enjoy marijuana than to enjoy drones. Marijuana is very effective at making a shit life tolerable, so people are more willing to break the law for it (and alcohol, etc).
No, but them making marijuana illegal and putting people in prison for it didn't really stop millions of people from having regular access to it.
And it'll be the same here in this context. If the government wants to make drones illegal because people are using them domestically for vigilante/terrorism purposes that'll be quite difficult.
People regularly ran clandestine grow operations that used 100kw+ of power for years and were never caught. If there's a desire for drones to commit crimes than someone will easily be able to make a clandestine drone factory.
They can't stop them all, but they definitely stopped anyone they caught.
Or 3D printers! You can print scary "ghost guns" with them. And they're mostly made in China. Although maybe Stratasys will push for that next now that they're lost their stranglehold on the market.
While the cheaper 3D printers are mostly chinese, Prusa is still a non-chinese option :)
While this is true and I own a Prusa MK4, they're so behind it's not even funny.
That depends entirely on your definition of "behind".
The MK4 delivers pretty much the same quality at the same speed as the P1P.
Paying 30% more to get an open-source, fully modular, fully repairable and customizable product that's made sustainably with fair wages is not a huge markup.
I'd gladly pay 30% more to get an Android phone that's fully modular, open-source, repairable, upgradable and made in the EU.
The speed of the MK4 for the same quality isn't even close to the P1P due to it being a bedslinger vs CoreXY gemoetry.
That's... quite misleading? The MK4 with input shaping is limited by extrusion speed, not the motion system.
The printers are both pretty identical in performance today. And while CoreXY has significantly more headroom in case you'd like to upgrade the current bottlenecks, that's not an option with the Bambu printers anyway.
Speed isn't everything, especially when more speed means more noise
This is true, they'd gotten too complacent and now Bambu is eating their lunch.
While Bamboo etc are one head in front of Prusa now, they are still very close in the context of printing weapons. I mean, neither are particularly suited compared to a CNC mill or lathe. And both have come quite a long way since what we had 10-15 years ago, when FDM for non-industrial users got started.
The bans are inevitable. It's only a matter of time before somebody tries to drop a pipe bomb on a politician.
I hope not, i'm pretty involved in the high power rocketry hobby and the materials/electronics and knowledge exist in the hobby to make something like a guided surface-to-surface rocket with a range in 10s of miles but no one does because it would instantly ruin the hobby for everyone. A friend of mine in heavy into r/c planes and is an embedded engineer so he has a bunch of autopilot stuff going on. I'm sure he can scale as high as he wants (he's also a private pilot) and fly a heavy payload to a point on a map autonomously. Again, no one does it because it would ruin the hobby for everyone.
Lots of people want to do this but the place for it is like a DARPA challenge not in the general hobby. If the authorities got wind of it then down come the regulations and no more hobby.
Yes, as a long-time fixed-wing RC hobbyist, it's generally the newbie idiots who do stupid things that threaten the entire hobby. Despite all the new rules (which I don't even bother to keep up with anymore), I still fly my planes like I always have. And just like always, I don't bother anyone and no one bothers me.
The problem for drones is easily weaponizable models exist off the shelf for people with malicious intentions and no interest in preserving the hobby. To weaponized a rocket requires more intellectual investment.
Hey at least if the drones are turned into weapons there's a chance the Supreme Court might overturn the bans.
They wouldn't want to use a firearm for that. Might get guns banned...
Would turning drones into arms not make them more, rather than less, protected in the US?
No
"Shall not be infringed!"
I like the way you think.
Explosive drones would be a destructive device. I don't know about drone mounted firearms though.
grenades are sold separately though.
"Batteries not included" just won't have the same ring again.
Everyone knew that they would be easy to convert into very effective weapons since the very start, no?
Just need to attach a trigger to the drone and then it can kill as many people as it wants without being regulated.
Why would ou think it's "dumb", when we've already had TikTok ban, tariff on Chinese EV, and chip ban on China?
It's very clear that China is an enemy that has to be dealt with by US
I already said why it's dumb
"the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends."
It's not practical, one should always assume or even pretend to be the cause of problems yourself.
Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?
Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?
Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?
In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)
You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.
If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?
We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?
Since corporations are people (in the minds of US jurists) wouldn't that make it an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder?
Whatever else you may think of the move ( I dislike it, because I dislike adding equivalent of riders to big bills like these ), it is surprisingly consistent with current wave of government actions ( recent placement of DeepCool on US sanctions list ). Things are happening and reading the political tea leaves makes one recognize current unmistakable trend as a the drums of war.
As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All their links to the starter kit are dead and only options is to contact sales for enterprise deals.
The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.
That's just an excuse, after 10 years failing to compete. Western drone companies have received billions in investments to make competing drones, but repeatedly fail, for some reason.
Western company can't compete, but that's on them. Banning DJI won't change anything, Western companies have to get their act together.
This isn't really true. Western drone companies haven't bothered competing in the consumer space, but they have made lots of advancement in the non-consumer space, where, arguably, the profits are better. Why try to compete with DJI for mail order drones going to kids when you can get a multi-million dollar contract with the Pentagon?
That didn't use to be true. There was once several Western consumer drone companies (3D Robotics, Parrot, GoPro, Intel, etc.) as recently as the mid-2010s. They gave up on the consumer space because DJI just totally ate their lunch, releasing better, cheaper drones year after year. I still remember how in any given year, the annual DJI drone releases would be smaller, cheaper, better, and fly longer than the other companies' drones (which were always a few years out of date) – AND they would have a whole range of consumer, prosumer, and professional drones and various kits and bundles for every market segment and price point. Nobody else could even remotely keep up.
Here's one Western article with some background: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-26/dji-s-dro.... According to it, by 2020, DJI had 80% of the US consumer drone market. It discusses how DJI ruthlessly operated its business and crushed all of its competitors. Even a later startup, founded by Tesla engineers who wanted to build batteries right into the frame, didn't do so well and was soon acquired by another company.
It's not that nobody bothered TRYING to compete with DJI. Everyone tried, both in the West and in China itself (e.g. Yuneec, Autel), but DJI beat them all. Their founder is basically the Chinese version of Musk.
From that article:
A rather confounding issue Impossible has faced is that the purchase bids put up by police and fire departments often have specifications that guarantee the sales will go to DJI. To illustrate, Gore pulls up a request for proposal for a drone from the Kansas Highway Patrol that lists properties such as flight time, cameras, and payload capacities. The numbers match up exactly with those of DJI’s Matrice 210. “If the U.S. wants to be competitive in robotics and drones, the least it can do to jump-start its own industrial base is to award government contracts to American companies or at least let them compete for them,” Gore says. “There are about 1,000 police departments receiving DHS grant dollars and spending them on Chinese-made, DJI-made drones. We are using our federal dollars to fund what could become one of China’s first prime contractors.” [...] “DJI has incredible lobbyists,” Gore says.
They competed until they were undercut, and then just didn't bother pursuing more profitable business instead. That is to say, if you can make a drone for $200, and DJI puts one out for $50, you don't really stand chance, so get out of the way and find more profitable businesses.
Anyways, DJI seems to just publish its revenue ($3.83b in 2021) but is it actually making money (profit, not revenue)? I'm not finding anything on Google. If they are selling each drone at a loss and just burning through VC still, that could be a huge problem.
Drones weren't just a commodity to be farmed out to the lowest bidder, though. DJI had significantly better technology in addition to being cheaper. They had better transmitters (with the standalone controllers), redundant sensors, obstacle detection and avoidance, camera sensors and lenses, FLIR, flight time, range, wind correction, gimbals, FPV headsets... all of it. Each year they'd come up with some major innovation and iterate on all the other parts, while their competitors would stagnate for several years at a time between new models (which couldn't compete even at release). In any given year, DJI always seemed to have the advantage. They did all of that ON TOP of being cheaper.
You don't get to do that by simply undercutting your competitors. No, DJI handily won the drone wars by being cheaper AND better and constantly improving. They simply outcompeted.
I think we have a tendency to look down on Chinese manufacturers as copycats, but DJI is an exception to that rule. Their founder Frank Wang was basically a young college engineer who bootstrapped the whole consumer drone industry, worked ruthlessly hard, and stayed way ahead of his competitors, becoming Asia's youngest billionaire. Forbes story about him: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/06/dji-drones-f...
The Wikipedia article is also interesting and shows how ruthless and effective the company was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI (for better or worse)
I mean, compare them to Lenovo, who's done nothing really new since they took over Thinkpads from IBM (except maybe folding convertibles). DJI is the polar opposite of that; they invented not only their own brand of drones, but pretty much created (and then dominated) the entire consumer drone market across the whole world.
If they were an American company, we'd be celebrating their success and Wang would be right up there next to Musk. DJI doesn't nearly get enough credit for the crazy amount of R&D they had to do to get the consumer drone industry to where it is today. Even if some of it is military trickle-down, that doesn't usually happen that quickly and cheaply. Even police & fire, who usually inherit those techs, tend to go with DJI, despite them not being US-made. IMO it's a shame that DJI happens to be caught up in the political turmoil of our times. Their products really are far above their peers. (And I don't even own any; sold my Phantom a decade ago.)
I don't know DJI's financials, but they've been around for nearly two decades by now. If they've been able to fool investors (or even the CCP) for that long while secretly losing money the whole time, well... guess they made a good business out of it? At least they made a useful product, compared to most of our shady ad-tech companies.
That is to say, if you can make a drone for $200, and DJI puts one out for $50, you don't really stand chance
The situation was more that western companies could make a drone for $1000, and DJI would make a significantly better drone for $500. Were they both $1000, the DJI drone would still clearly be better.
I am not praising DJI for free here. I just think that we need to face the truth. There is no way to improve with denial.
Western drone companies haven't bothered competing in the consumer space
This is factually wrong. Most drone companies have tried in the consumer space before pivoting towards the military. The military has been more and more present since around 2019, and most Western drone companies have pivoted to the military since Ukraine. Not because it's more profitable, but really because they failed in the consumer space.
Also the military makes it easier for Western companies because DJI cannot compete (obviously). But I am absolutely convinced that DJI is better at making military drones ("micro aerial vehicles") than the West.
Frankly, the DoD likely spent something like 5-8 trillion dollars over the last 10 years.
If we establish that drone manufacturing is a matter of national security, it seems critically important to understand why domestic production keeps failing and fix those problems rather than just giving up.
If it's a matter of national security, why would it be made available to the American consumer? They'd have more than enough business from the DoD, and wouldn't have to compete on price.
I mean... 10 years of not being able to compete with companies subsided with a world powers national treasury isn't really saying much of anything
Right now they can't compete.
Why? Because they aren't good enough, and if they have no competition they'll have to actually do something?
I'll build a drone for you with open source components if you are shopping for one, it will cost more than a DJI but less than these other options.
Any guides or pointers on how to do this myself? Looking into pixhawk seems like most of the options are still pretty obscure. I own a 3D printer and am not afraid of a soldering iron :)
If you can do that at scale, it sounds like you have a viable business. There is clearly a demand for it.
Will it be as good. I mean control, video recording and signal. Compatible with some HD goggles? I really doubt, but if you can explain...
Autel Nano or Lite+.
Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all.
Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting
Some Autel drone are made in the USA
You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.
I assume one of the goals of this is to change that by making it feasible for US companies to compete at least on the domestic market.
Ukraine has shown that having domestic at-scale consumer drone production is a critical military capability. I bet part of the motivation behind this is protectionism to make sure this capability can be built up. Otherwise any war against China starts with China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day, likely with mostly or entirely domestic supply chains, without even going to a war economy, while the US cannot manufacture the same class of weapon at any comparable scale.
There's nothing.
Skydio exited the consumer market. Their drones had good autonomy and flight characteristics. However, they struggled with wireless link quality due to the use of consumer WiFi, and had much older, inferior camera sensors compared to even contemporary DJI drones. They were also ridiculously loud and inefficient. Their enterprise drones are comically expensive and loaded with nickel-and-dime cloud features.
Parrot drones struggle with the same issues as Skydio (Skydio actually used a Parrot remote controller for their consumer drones), plus their autonomy isn't nearly as good as even Skydio's, the overall drone behavior is "clunky" (slow boot times, slow connection times, non-responsive flight controls), and even basic flight is more challenging.
The main issues plaguing US consumer drones are imaging sensors and wireless link. LTE and other well-suited long range wireless technologies capable of handling speed differential between the station and access point are locked in a vault of patents. Imaging sensors are legendarily impossible to acquire in low to moderate quantities and image sensor parameters are carefully locked behind a billion levels of NDA (thus why even the Raspberry Pi camera is full of DRM).
I was on a project that was subject to the cleared UAS list you linked, and I cannot recommend either Parrot (incredibly long boot times, underpowered motors meant it was slow and had poor station keeping in high winds) or Skydio (bad heat management/low thermal cutoffs to the point that during the California high desert summer our unit wouldn't even start due to reporting that it was overheated) at all. So maybe its not too bad that they're no longer for sale.
Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?
Yes this is a strange one.
There is no viable competitor to DJI for consumers when it comes to the software side especially -- DJI software is miles ahead of the other drone producers (on-drone and their mobile apps).
When I try to download DJI fly app from the Play Store it always crashes.
which drone do you have? there is a DJI fly app version that you have to sideload. The current ones on playstore are just fine
Mini 2
I always had sideloaded fly app for mini 2. You can get it directly on the dji website
I thought they stopped distributing it via the Play store and required side-loading now.
Correct. This is why all the drones come with screens on the sticks now.
Like they said, the market leader.
Worked with Huawei. Look at the smartphone market pre and post Huawei ban, immediate crater.
I'm sorry, but what exactly happen after Huawei ban?
They are probably referring to the period where Huawei struggled to even ship a device because of sanctions applied to them that made it impossible to source components.
Once these were overcome they have bounced back and are looking stronger than ever, their revenue has now risen above the pre-sanctions peak.
Pre Huawei ban, they had 30% smartphone market. Each year that looked like it was trending upwards without any sign of stopping.
The year after? Poof, very small percentage of the global market.
Huawei didn't have the best phones by far. DJI is miles ahead of anything else one can buy.
I agree that Huawei didn't have the best phones, but it was not that far off, and for the price it was arguably a better phone.
Need a phone with a great camera? Then Huawei is much better than anything Samsung, Apple, and Google makes. Huawei market share was taking off at crazy speed before the bans on both the software and hardware side.
The Huawei ban's impact on smartphones was mostly a side effect. The real target was wireless infrastructure. Any time spent analyzing the phone stuff is a waste, that was all mostly collateral damage as we tried to prevent Huawei from dominating our domestic 5G (and related) networks.
Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?
I guess that depends on what the goal is? If a foreign company is the market leader, banning it allows US companies to take over the domestic market without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.
Which US companies are going to have a $500 competent consumer drone with a great camera, solid reliability, and top of the line ease of use to sell me the day this ban goes into effect, or even 5 years down the road? The answer is none.
There are no US companies capable of serving this market. None can produce the product DJI did and consumers will abandon the market before they'll transition to a product that costs twice as much for half the value.
This is not like smartphones or laptops or televisions or any of that, it's not needed, it's a total luxury and hobby for 95% of buyers. They will walk before adopting a shitty US-based alternative and the market will shrivel and die.
So, this is a fine policy if hurting US consumers by destroying an entire field of hobby to thumb our noses at China is the goal. It's a broken policy of stimulating a US alternative is the goal. To accomplish the latter, subsidies and reasonable tariffs are the right approach, not bans.
without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.
This assumes end users will accept an inferior product. Without some additional pressure - subsidies or hell even nationalism - a ban alone won’t magically create on par US companies.
China has been doing this for decades so we don’t need to guess here. They seem to always bring much broader societal, financial and other support not just restrict access
"free market". Unless there's something better than what our own companies can do (Bombardier C-Series jets, DJI drones, BYD Electric Vehicles), then protectionism.
Also, I have to say that I find it very weird that random unrelated legislation can be in the same "act".
When companies receive outsized state subsidies that allow them to undercut the markets, it's not an apples for apples comparison.
As for the unrelated legislation, I agree. Too many things are tacked on / added on. NO ONE is reading these things in complete given that sometimes they receive the full 1k pages hours before the vote.
The other issue is the number of things funded that shouldn't be in general but that's a whole other can of worms. It's become a i'll vote for your thing if you give me this thing, for every single vote and that's toxic and gross.
If the US unfree market for automobiles (hello 2008) can't compete with Chinese state sponsored EVs, should we not do state subsidized EV and battery development here? Isn't electric transport that important?
If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?
My conspiracy theory would be that the US government doesn't want the citizen to have effective drones for surveillance and recon in the event of civil conflict. They want a Killswitch. (Totally crackpot but it sounds believable).
I'm with you here. It's not a D/R thing it's a top bottom divide.
If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?
Yes exactly. If some companies are doing things that you don't like, like misusing personal information and transferring it to other countries, it is much better to enact general laws that prevent that, as the EU is doing, rather than passing laws that ban individual Chinese companies.
It would be as if rather than regulating car safety, we had a situation where lots of cars by both US and foreign automakers had massive safety problems, but rather than fixing that in general, we simply chose to ban specific Chinese car brands on supposed national security grounds while ignoring that cars made by US companies had the exact same problems.
Your questions are right, but the conspiracy theory is dreadfully wrong. If you want a motivating force for banning, but not actually competing by leveling the field, it’s ideology. The US government doesn’t do subsidies (except when they do).
The saddest thing about these decline of American manufacturing, and the fragility of supply chains is that all of this was predicted 30 years ago, but Wall Street and the billionaire management class did their typical shortsighted profits taking instead of sustainability, soured on by ideological capture of both parties.
I often think about how the world would be different if the people actual won the Battle of Seattle.
It does poke a hole through the concept of markets that are free of government intervention lead to cheaper goods. I doubt these subsidies don’t further government revenue in some way, so is the Chinese government a better capital allocator than the free market? They’ve made bets on solar, EVs, battery tech, and pretty much everything related to advanced manufacturing bar the latest CPU lithography, and right now they’re winning. Such a narrative couldn’t sit well with the US that poses as the poster child of laissez-faire capitalism (though often with heavy government interference of its own)
The Chinese government is playing the "kill competitors with price cuts" game on the national level by not floating their currency AND subsidizing their major international tech. Eventually someone will foot this bill. They hope the marbles they gain will be worth the cost.
Nothing stopping the US government making big bets of its own. But perhaps it has in military tech. At any rate, the free market ideal has been proven as fallible as any ideal in practice
so has this ever happened in the past, or just baseless speculation at this point? this thread is chock full of china experts telling us with certainly what china is going to do (justified with a lot of "just trust me bro") but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence
C-Series is "better" in large part because its favorable pricing was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government.
And I'm not sure you want to get into a discussion about China and protectionism, to say nothing of national security concerns.
C-Series is "better" in large part because its favorable pricing was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government
Just like Boeing gets billions in tax breaks, various aids and in theory extremely profitable if they weren't so damn incompetent military contracts?
And no, it's better because it's more efficient. Over the lifetime of a plane it's purchase price is a tiny part of the total costs.
I think we share the same opinion on Boeing itself. But what is the difference between Boeing's advantage in the US vs Bombardier's in Canada?
Minimal (outside of the fact that a lot of the money given to Bombardier resulted in equity for Quebec and wasn't just handouts; but in terms of % of the whole program it's a wash).
Yet Canada isn't out there banning Boeing planes or asking for 300% tariffs on them for "unfair competition".
I agree that it’s protectionism, 100%. DJI seems to have been remarkably clean from what I understand with no reason to warrant a ban other than it’s Chinese.
That being said, they have an insane lead in the market (rightfully earned). I don’t think US companies could ever hope to seriously compete without some form of unfair advantage, and the US has no reason to not grant it, especially given China’s tactics with EVs
The thing about EVs that I don't get with this argument is US auto has been bailed out, subsidized, protected and otherwise coddled for it's entire life. If that doesn't grant it an unfair advantage what will?
The reality is that US protectionism has instead created a market where they didn't need to compete. Where they could build ever bigger cars with only Califonia even attempting to try nudge them in the direction of the rest of the world.
China showing up and eating their lunch isn't because of subsidies, it's due to gross negligence on the behalf of legacy auto.
Has everyone already forgotten the endless hit pieces on Tesla? The almost weekly espousing that "EVs will never work?". I haven't.
This was entirely self-inflicted and just like the first round of protectionism that was designed to ward off Japanese auto industry it will probably end the same way.
There is no such thing as "Free Market" when trading with China. Pretty every non-trivial trade with China is in fact a trade with their government, which is anything but a reflection of freedom in any shape of form.
But this isn't simply protectionism. In terms of dollar value and jobs lost, the drone trade is minuscule. It's about military technology and spying - and this is not paranoia, I guess I can't prove it to you, but I can at least say it.
For people wonder how this got there, the blame goes to Rep. Elise Stefanik:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864
That bill was tacked onto a big "must pass" defense authorization and may not have survived on its own.
Here's an article with some speculation on why Stefanik introduced this bill: https://dronexl.co/2024/06/06/drone-industry-outrage-stefani...
What a shocker. One of the most worthless partisan blowhards in congressional history.
She's Dick Cheney to MTG/Boeberts Dubya Bush.
The sicker thing to me is how she (like many) was actually relatively moderate until she completely hitched her wagon onto the Trump train. Another Profile in Cowardice. An overview: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/women-rule/2023/01/06/t...
All of these politicians who have these completely transactional relationships, I just find utterly gross. I mean, do they have any actual friends? For example, Trump completely disparaged Ted Cruz's wife and father in 2016, Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar" back then, only to do a total 180 and turn into another boot licker.
Politicians have put aside their personal beefs with Trump in response to their constituents. The republican base doesn’t want foreign wars and tax cuts, they want to kick the illegal immigrants out of the country and curtail foreign trade. Remember when Joe Biden told black voters Romney “wants to put them back in chains?” The Republican base wants their version of that guy, and that’s Trump. For Stefanik, Cruz, etc., their job is to put aside their personal preferences and get on board with what their constituents want.
I understand that, and I think it's a fair point, but there is also the issue of leadership.
E.g. there are tons of Republican "elites" who know that the whole "stop the steal" stuff and falsehoods around Trump winning in 2020 are complete, total, and utter bullshit. We know this because they've said it! My favorite example is when Liz Cheney wrote in her book that Republican Rep Mark Green said, as he was signing electoral vote objection sheets on Jan 6, "The things we do for The Orange Jesus." (In transparency, Green later denied this).
My point is its one thing to do what your constituents desire. Its another thing to propagate lies and bullshit because you think that will help you gain power, even if your constituents do love those lies and bullshit. I'd also point out that there have been a number of conservative and Republican leaders (not many, but some) who actually have some honor and have called out these lies, which has usually forced them to retire or leave the party.
I agree in the abstract, but I think that’s encompassed by my point that the Republican base wants to fight fire with fire: https://youtu.be/iRYB6N8fBKQ?si=-bSwtvosf-o4PE0z.
I think “principled Republicans” don’t know what time it is. Trump’s only mistake was not saying “I formally concede” before spending years saying the election was stolen. That’s the new normal and has been since 2000.
And yet, with all those examples in that video of Democrats saying those things (some of which I think are valid, e.g. that Russian propaganda did help Trump get elected even if there was no collusion, though I don't agree at all that this makes Trump's presidency "illegitimate"), trying to say that is equivalent to what Trump did in 2020/2021 is plain ridiculous.
For one, despite her rhetoric, Hillary Clinton actually conceded the 2016 election. Obama actually sat down with Trump when he was president-elect in the White House. I don't recall Obama egging on an unruly mob to attack the Capitol to prevent certification of Trump's win.
And similarly, I'm having a very difficult time believing that Bush supporters would have conceded as graciously as Gore did in 2000. So spare me with the "both sides"-isms.
A concession has no legal effect. We have the tradition because it reassures the supporters of the losing candidate that the election system is trustworthy. If you say the word “concede” but then spend the next four years saying “the election was stolen” and “the president is illegitimate” you’re damaging public trust just as much as if you hadn’t conceded.
Gore, more than anyone in recent memory, deserves a special place in hell for helping turn American elections into the circus we have today. Gore exploited a loophole in Florida election law to seek hand recounts only in counties that had gone heavily in his favor. Since hand recounts identify valid votes the machine rejected, hand recounting a Gore-leaning subset of all the ballots would identify disproportionately more new Gore votes. It was blatant cheating, and on top of that the (apparently innumerate) Florida Supreme Court did things like allow the results of partially completed hand recounts to be added to certified election results. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Gore’s shenanigans twice, once in a per curiam decision, and the other in a 7-2. (The part that everyone remembers, the 5-4 part, was only about whether to give Florida yet another chance to do a valid recount. But it was Gore’s fuckery that put the Supreme Court in the lose-lose position of having to decide that issue.)
There is nobody who hates election denial more than me. We should throw people in prison for saying that duly elected officers are illegitimate or that elections were stolen. We shouldn’t be able to litigate election results for all but the most obvious malfeasance. Seeing America today reminds me of the third world country I’m from, and it sickens me to see Americans behaving like third world people.
Not sure why you are being downmodded. Stefanik touts herself as a MAGA princess, but she's nothing but a grifter.
She’s a New York Republican, don’t assign anything to her with strong conviction.
And if you need a backgrounder on Stefanik, she got elected before Trump, decided she preferred staying in DC to her hometown, sold out her previously-stated principles almost immediately when she saw a chance to gain power, and is now doing as much damage to civil liberties as Nixon and McCarthy ever managed:
https://theracket.news/p/stop-going-stefanik-committee-fools
She doesn't care about whether the bill does something valid or even whether it survives legal challenges, as long she can use it to score political points. It's a real shame. Congresspeople are supposed to be servants beholden to the public good, not power-hungry sycophants who can't be bothered with the details of governance.
I'll add more as a NY21 local:
I've never seen her. I've never heard from her locally. You can't fucking find Elise. It's all events in the past. There's never been a townhall up in this portion of her region.
Bonus: Her husband is a lobbyist for a leading gun industry trade group. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Stefanik-s-husband-K...
Her husband has lobbied for NSSF… Why is that bad?
The complaint is typically about access. If you have a policy you'd like your rep to advance, you're stuck going through the same channels nearly everyone is: call, write a letter, etc.
If Alice Armalite or Bob Browning[0] wants something advanced, they call their guy who knows not just Stefanik, but probably a bunch of other reps socially through her.
Who's more likely to actually get the ear of a politician: you, or Alice Armalite?
To be clear, I don't think it's a good look for a politician to have personal ties that close with any lobbyist, even ones for the American Foundation for Fluffy and Adorable Kittens.
[0] Not real people, one suspects.
I’ll contrast that with people like Jamie Raskin. I’ve met him personally (briefly, but multiple times) because he shows up at random music festivals and civic events. It’s really not hard to tell when a politician is interested in public feedback.
I'd rather blame everyone who voted on this, actually. Every one in Congress is an adult and were free to decide how to vote on this, afaik.
Naive question: what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada? It's a physical product, so banning it like TikTok or big vehicles is impossible, or am I missing something?
Since the control apps tap into GPS so they know when you're in a restricted zone, the gov't could simply make them mark all of the US as a restricted zone and the drone will never fly. I have one, I'm not happy about this.
This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were. GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.
The drone would look it up through a connected cell phone using a web service like this:
https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr_map_ims/html/
I think (hope) it would be a hard sell to send different data from faa.gov to DJI drone lookups versus other brands, but on the other hand this complete brand ban is apparently politically possible.
DJI's no-fly zone database is completely independent from the US government. DJI would have to be compelled to add the US as a no-fly zone, which, if their drones are banned already, seems like a rather difficult thing to compel as there's no carrot at the end of the stick.
I mean, the carrot in the short term would be to raise public opposition to the bill. And possibly reduce support for the politicians pushing for the ban.
I've got a DJI drone and I've always been worried of some OTA software update essentially making the device useless. I've got a separate iPhone 8 that I don't connect to WiFi any more that I use only to control the drone. Though honestly my fear was more that the FAA would add dumber regulations and push them on DJI to enforce, which they seem to have already done quite a bit.
This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were.
Nope, it happens in the control app on your device.
GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.
No one said it could.
I'm going back to the first gen mavic here in memory, but...
Didn't they run Android, and you could root them to remove the no fly zones?
The old hack doesn't work anymore.
This is the correct answer. DJI will happily geofence any area in America to be able to keep selling their project here.
But will they happily geofence all of it if they are not allowed to keep selling their product?
what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada?
Because if you choose to do this, and it's against the law, you open yourself up to sanctions and punishment?
Nothing.
But Canada is a long long distance for many Americans. America is pretty big and Canadian cities are sparse along the border.
The US doesn't care if Americans buy them from Canada. The point of the law is to encourage US made drone manufacturing, because we'll need it during a war.
They don't care if a drone here or there slips thought, it's irrelevant to the point of the law.
what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada
Canada has significant regulations around purchasing and operation of drones [0]
[0] - https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2017/2017-07-15/html/reg2...
Nothing, they could even buy it in US... the ban is on Chinese company using Federal Communications Commission frequencies and they have all the good ones or even all of them.
I can't imagine what it would take for them to enforce the ban, so people would highly likely continue using and buying DJI products.
Because Canada will follow every stupid decisions from its main partner.
So I guess the new viable business strategy in the US is:
1. Find a sector which a foreign companies dominates
2. Enter this sector even with a bad product
3. Go to congress and get the other ones banned because they are "insert reason here".Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists? If you look at what's happening in Ukraine It's pretty much a given that the US defense sector is looking at ways to improve the US small drone manufacturing capabilites, and have less potentially hostile drones flying over their own territory.
There are a lot of coincidences[1] and since congress can legally insider trade it would not surprise me if some involved have stock in some of these companies.
Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists?
I work in the drone industry, and this is so very obvious that I don't know where I would start describing it.
Yes, it was pushed by lobbyists. Every single US drone company has been pushing for a DJI ban for years.
The effect is that the US loses its competitive edge in international markets. Is another country going to buy Tesla or BYD? Are they going to buy a DJI or an overpriced US drone? It might protect companies locally but for how long?
And what happens when you taking dumping to the logical extreme? You wind up with nobody domestically that can do any advanced work at all, because everyone gets put out of business. Then we have nothing to export and no skill or capability gradient to climb.
BYD exists because of Chinese economic protectionism. China carved out a space for its domestic products to grow. We should do the same.
Every country does it from time to time. We are going to see the end of globalisation as we have known it for the last 30+ years. The Russians and the Chinese made everyone realise that it is better to make stuff at home.
That's how tech works with all over-reaching governments. (China, Russia, Korea, Japan and the US, etc.)
The mercantilist impulse will live forever.
Welcome to the real world
DJI's response (a bit dated)
https://dronedj.com/2024/03/02/dji-response-drone-ban-us/
The allegations are so subjective that they sound like some middle schooler complaining to their mom.
“DJI drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperature and heart rate.”
DJI's response Technically, DJI suggests using drones for body temperature checks is unfeasible.
https://www.thedronegirl.com/2020/05/06/dji-coronavirus-dron...
US politicians have totally lost their minds to even propose something like this.
Allowing a company that repeatedly violates basic app store rules and exports data to a country with adversarial interests unrestricted access to our infrastructure via drones is highly problematic.
This problematic situation extends in many ways to critical sectors of our economy, including agriculture, energy, defense, etc.
The data collected by these drones is extensive and sensitive. Crop data alone is crucial, and if this information cannot be controlled, it should not be exported.
This stance is not anti-China, but no country should permit unrestricted access to its airspace for surveillance.
Data is the new oil as well, especially with AI. These drone derived datasets are becoming critical path information.
How else can you control the information besides a ban? I LOVE DJI and have several of these drones. But I don’t know how I feel about this because of the problematic data issues. It’s complex and the situation is very difficult.
Its funny because app store rules aren't laws. If we were really concerned about privacy, we'd have our own strong GDPR that mandated privacy and control measures and controls. Banning things doesn't work because the base foundational protections aren't there.
The ability to abide by all store rules are not only legally enforceable contracts between companies — they are legal agreements after all — but a strong indicator of whether companies will abide by the normalized standards required to do business in an ecosystem.
Privacy protection is not the issue at the heart of these concerns: it’s national security.
Unconvincing tbh. Research papers have shown that heartrate can be tracked from cameras with well under 4k resolution. Doing it with DJI's excellent camera tech should be quite easy.
As far as US infrastructure, google street view and bing maps seem to be a bigger information disclosure threat but I guess they do blur out faces.
Google street view isn't going to be driving around sensitive government facilites or electrical infrastructure though - and you really can't guarantee no curious citizens will try to fly their dji drone over said facilities. So all DJI needs to do is put in an if(location == government_facility) and sit back and wait for the camera feed from some idiot american.
Agreed, but IMO the greater threat is smartphone apps. There are all kinds of AI photo and video manipulation apps and they have multiple ways to get precise location via gps, wifi, and photo metadata with the added advantage that many photos are taken both indoor and outdoors.
Seems like a ban on all those apps (not just tiktok) is more appropriate or at least required in addition. From a security POV, the restriction really needs to be at the iOS or AndroidOS level.
typical USA's playbook: can't compete - ban
DJI suggests using drones for body temperature checks is unfeasible.
There are many ways of checking body temperature. Armpit, rectal, ... Did they try them all?
"Thermal imaging from the air has never been as easy as it is with the DJI Zenmuse XT."
Maybe I never got to the part of an economics education that covers exceptions having stopped at intro econ, but don't trade wars almost always lead to bad times?
The theory is that it leads to worse outcomes for the weaker partner and less-bad outcomes for the stronger one.
- People used to think Japan was going to overtake the USA, until a short trade war in the 80's sent Japan on a downward spiral.
- The trade war against Russia hurt the West a lot with higher energy and food prices, but it whacked the Russian economy very much harder.
- The same thing can be said for the West vs USSR - it hurt the West, but bankrupted the USSR
Isn’t the US the weaker partner here?
Struggling to understand in which context the US is the weaker partner.
- GDP [0]
- Total wealth [1]
- Military
- Demographics (US - growing, China - aging and shrinking)
- Soft power
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/
[1] [https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/glo...]
Manufacturing capability and infrastructure would be my guess. I guess if the trend continues and factories keep moving to India and Mexico, it might be a different game in 10 years.
Also automation might have a huge effect on this. It's expensive and slow to ship things all over the place.
We're not seeing that trend take off in a major way yet, but I think a lot of the raw ingredients are there.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/12/manufacturing-is-gro...
GDP and wealth are hard to compare because China does so much stuff for cheaper. They can build massive infrastructure projects like high speed trains, huge bridges and dams all for way cheaper than we do, so their money actually goes farther. That means even for the same GDP they have more productive capability.
Military is not the only way to exercise power - look at the Belt and Road initiative.
Demographics - how many PhDs are coming out of each country.
And obviously we’re banning DJI because they are the dominant player - we couldn’t compete economically so we’re using legal power instead. If the US was just better at building consumer drones this never would have happened.
Your first point about things being cheaper over there is true but that's not all there is to it. They're still in the basic infrastructure phase of growth. So they can build that much cheaper because people there get paid peanuts, and land is cheap. As soon as they reach a saturation point of prosperity close to where the US is now, they'll see prices spike to equal US levels. If this ever happens.
Military is not the only way to exercise power - look at the Belt and Road initiative.
The military is the only thing that matters when the chips are really down. China can try to buy international favour with it's dodgy infrastructure deals, but that's not the same as deep, long-term alliances, and a competent military-industrial complex. The US has troops and advanced weapons stationed all over the place, including right next to China. I'd be amazed if the opposite ever becomes true.
Demographics - how many PhDs are coming out of each country.
There's a fair bit more to demographics than the number of PhDs - not sure why you think this even matters.
And obviously we’re banning DJI because they are the dominant player - we couldn’t compete economically so we’re using legal power instead. If the US was just better at building consumer drones this never would have happened.
Now it's true that DJI is the best, but this is not yet part of a broader trend where China is outcompeting the US on quality. And keep in mind that China is using its internal legal power to spend public money pushing companies such as Huawei, DJI, and Bytedance.
Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills?
If DJI is doing nasty things, prohibit the nasty things DJI doing in the law, not the brand. Then condemn DJI if needed. How do this law protect from any DJi competitor doing the same stuff (or even a spinoff company through a complex scheme)?
I wonder, though, could this be considered an unconstitutional bill of attainder? That's an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of people, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, without a trial. Article I, Section 9, iii: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed".
That's one of the arguments being made by TikTok in their challenge against the "TikTok ban" bill.
That’s been my thought since the TikTok ban as well. It was meant for people, but this for sure seems to meet the spirit of the prohibition. Does it actually violate it? We’ll have to see once the cases work their way through.
Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills?
People who want to move this country even further in the direction of Rule By Law, as opposed to Rule Of Law.
This sort of thing works out well for the already-connected and corrupt, and it's not like anyone in 2024 is deluded that we make principled decisions on anything.
Maybe Elise Stefanik was just really upset that she had to side-load the sketchy DJI APK on her Android device?
If they ban nasty things as such they can't do them themselves anymore without breaking the law.
Not that they care.
So, anyone know what DJI is without googling first? Cuz this article doesn't say.
God I'm glad I'm not the only one. I'm working on getting a newsletter up and running and I'm so focused on best writing practices and these guys can't even remember to define their acronyms first?
and these guys can't even remember to define their acronyms first?
DJI is not an acronym, it's the name of a company. And DJI is the most famous drone company; asking to "define DJI", on an article for a site about drones like that one, would be like asking to "define Boeing" on an article for a site about airplanes.
Boeing is a word that looks like a proper noun and, more importantly, is a much more well-known company than DJI. Moreover, for those of us who don't know it's a company, DJI looks like an acronym, so the writer should have clarified, aka defined it.
It's the worlds premier consumer drone manufactor.
Founded in 2006, worth over $15 billion.
It's not quite as widely known as say Apple, Google, or Disney.
But it has more brand awareness than most other modern brands.
I'd recon it beats Alibaba, Figma, Webflow, etc...
These types of comments confuse me, because it would be faster to Google it and get an answer in 10 seconds than to post a comment and wait for a response.
Besides, from reading the article, context alone should tell you that DJI is a Chinese drone brand.
Ever seen the videos of ... thing being dropped on people from a drone in the last two something years? That drone is usually DJI Mavic
US is spiralling down and I feel like I am in a Truman Show with egregious presidential behaviours, dragging the world into wars which it doesn't need, banning chips, even sanctioning open source (RISC) software.
And this is further making the rest of the world enraged, china more so. Today they released Open source Deep Seek which beats GPT 4o in coding problems.
The train has left the station and the US is stuck. On the wrong platform. With no ticket.
Haha sure.
Let me guess, the train is to a third tier Chinese city no one is interesting in going to, on tracks that the local government can't afford to pay the construction financing on, let alone future maintenance.
I'm sure you're right that third tier Chinese cities are awful.
But major Chinese cities are very far ahead of America in terms of infrastructure. Similarly DJI is very far ahead of any of its competitors.
Banning Chinese things because of politics is one thing. But pretending it's because they're inferior is just ridiculous.
Ah yes, the city built yesterday is nicer than the city built 100 years ago. And the point is?
China funded all that pretty infrastructure on massive local debt that the fees are not covering. Will be interesting to see how that works out long term.
Edit: I love China. I love the chinese people. I loved Shanghai of the 2010s. I've worked with a ton of amazing chinese developers in the Bay Area that were stranded after tiananmen, and I'm sad for their tragedy but they were definitely a boon to the USA. I don't think Americans are superior to Chinese in any way. I also don't think a new building/infrastructure being nicer than old buildings/infrastructure proves anything anyone who upgraded to a new car from an old one doesn't already know.
Which is an ironic comment to make, considering the difference in high-speed rail development in China vs in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_... (TL;DR: China's high speed rail network is the longest and most used in the world, as well as cheaper than the US's)
Why build all that infrastructure when the same use case is already being met with airplanes? The USA serves it's tier 3 cities much more efficiently with a few plane routes than building an entire high speed rail would.
Again, China's high speed rail utilization is not even able to pay for it's initial build out, and is very under utilized as it goes to tier 3 locations that don't justify it. Will be interesting to see how it plays out once 'maintenance debt' (technical debt but for infrastructure) gets added to the 'build out debt'. If those tier 3 cities turn tier 1 it will look like genius investment, but I don't see it happening.
Everyone in the comments seems to be against this: why? Let's build up a great domestic drone company here in the US.
Surely this is possible without just banning competitors, no?
The competition is literally an arm of the state of China, which is able to subsidize the business and send prices through the floor. Why would any entrepreneur choose to compete with a state-backed enterprise? And by the way, have you heard of tariffs? We literally "ban" all kinds of products with very high tariffs.
You can build your own drone quite cheaply using open source technologies, so I don't believe that industrial competition is as impossible as you say; especially given the existence of US subsidies/tax breaks for anything remotely defense related.
And by the way, have you heard of good manners? They make discussions much more productive than smug comebacks.
you can build your own drone quite cheaply using open source technologies
Problem is that literally ever single part that goes into building a DIY drone is sourced from China. You can 3d print the frame. But that's about it. Most drone hobbyist buy them from sellers in the U.S that import them in bulk from China or they order directly from sites like AliExpress.
Banning foreign drones just gives domestic drone companies even less incentive to compete on quality. If the foreign drone company is benefiting unfairly from subsidies, then the way to beat them is to subsidise US drone companies, creating fair competition.
A few things to note here.
1.) DJI offers many drones related to infrastructure mapping and maintenance, as well as agricultural tasks. From a national security perspective, it is a non-trivial threat vector for a Chinese company to not only have intimate knowledge of US infrastructure by being their drone supplier, but also by becoming a dependency of US infrastructure. In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
2.) When it comes to protectionism, I'm generally against it, but I have different thoughts when it comes to China. They have banned Uber, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc, and just make their own versions of it. Then they have absolutely no respect for international laws when it comes to IP. They don't compete economically according to the same rules as everyone else, and don't deserve to be treated the same way.
3.) I have 2 DJI drones. The fact that there is no mention of compensation in this legislature is absurd. Fortunately, I don't rely on these for my business, but imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business. Not only are you grounding the tools that they've already come to depend on, but there isn't an existing viable alternative on the market for many of these tasks.
Kudos to you for being able to make the first 2 points fairly despite being personally affected by this. Rare that you'd see that. Most people would start with the 3rd point and try to minimise anything that contradicts.
imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business.
Unfortunately I suspect this group is already quite small due to the existing heavy-handed regulation of drones for anything other than recreational use. Or they're at least "under the table."
You need a drone pilot's license to legally fly a drone for anything other than recreational use. This has already decimated a lot of the most direct and interesting use cases for us.
In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
That's only an issue if the drone somehow depends on an external Internet-based server, instead of just a plain radio link between the drone and its controller. The law should target that unnecessary dependency, if it exists, instead of banning even standalone drones.
All good points, and it's painful to see you flagged likely by some political operation.
So what's America's plan to survive?
Ban almost everything they used to buy? (i.e. goods manufactured in China)
Which Made in the Good Ol' US of A consumer drones are people supposed to purchase instead of a DJI Mini?
We make so much in China, I don’t get what the deal is, here. Just that a US billionaire isn’t making the money?
Once DJI gets banned, a new consumer company will come around and will happily import all the parts from China then slap on a substantial markup. I'm placing bets that DJI will somehow whitelabel the drones.
It's funny the lengths the US public and political machine will go to avoid blaming the business sector that outsourced all of everything to China over the last few decades. Chinese manufacturing got the tools and know-how to build these devices and have done a great job iterating on that knowledge across many different sectors and product categories.
Didn't we discover this recently? Like some domestic drone company was supplying drones to the law enforcement but most of the parts and software came from DJI.
Yep: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/business/china-drones-anz...
Oof, perhaps time to stock up if you rely on this equipment.
Oof, perhaps time to stock up if you rely on this equipment.
(I didn't read the bill, but based on the article alone...)
Looks like it's a tentative ban on usage, not sale nor ownership.
And currently with no "pre-ban" grandfathering-in, nor compensation for US people who'd be affected by the ban (e.g., investments in equipment, operations disrupted, migration costs).
One measure that would be interesting: a buyback of banned DJI gear, issuing vouchers that can be spent with non-disapproved drone brands.
That might help make DJI owners whole, and consistent with some of the presumed goals behind banning use of DJI. Though it's spending taxpayer money.
The problem from my perspective, running a small DJI fleet in Civil Engineering, is that there are few comparative turnkey options from non-disapproved drone brands that actually compete with what I'm using now. The ones that could, are drastically more expensive.
From my understanding / research, the approved suppliers are largely focusing on the LE, Military markets.
Current list of cleared UAS https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list
I wish there was a way for the public to vote on all of these bills! We need to be able to give feedback to these senators about what the public wants. And to me the public wants DJI.
Yes, if only there was some kind of democratic process in this country, where citizens could influence the laws that are passed...
Is this some kind of sarcastic joke? Anti-China legislation is popular with both parties. So who do you vote for in a two-party system?
You vote for the side that's most favorable to reform and then vote for the people within that party most likely to bend things toward your goals, ideally slowly shifting one side's stance toward yours until there is a difference between the parties. You and everyone you can convince go do that work, and it is work, for 5-10 cycles and you might effect meaningful change.
There was never a "one election will fix everything" in the US and people who pretend that's the only path and use that to discount the possibility of change were never serious about change to begin with. Had they been serious, they'd have studied history enough to see you rarely get what you want with one election cycle.
It's the quitters that got us into this uniparty situation on so many issues. Don't be a quitter, get active and stay active until you see the change you want.
Keep seeing DJI drones at local police dept open houses. They even have a "drone unit" that specializes in SAR, hazardous recon type scenarios. Given extensive existing use throughout US local law enforcement, fire depts etc, not sure if this will actually happen.
Or maybe they all mass-migrate to Anduril solutions?
It's going to be a disaster for SAR, policing, firefighting, and all kinds of public good. The whole thing is an incredibly shortsighted move that will literally cost lives.
The goal, I think, is that these organizations will migrate to Skydio or BRINC (as they have the only reasonably viable drones for most of these use cases IMHO).
The reality is that they'll buy Autel (just as Chinese as DJI) or just keep using DJI and hoping the FCC Radio Police don't show up, which is probably a safe bet. Anduril don't really sell into this space.
In five years the US will have a prolific consumer drone industry and will have hardly skipped a beat. This is a good move for the US from a long-term security and economic standpoint. There are some short term pains but long-term this is good.
Did you get paid 50 cents to write all these posts?
I know a state police drone pilot. There are 6 people on the team.
They use Mavic 2A and 3 drones for thermal. Mostly surveillance.
They use DJI Avata for whipping through a house faster than people can. They use this for hostage and other possibly dangerous scenarios.
I know for a fact they are often breaking the FAA laws on lights and line of sight. They don’t care because they’re “good guys”.
I worry that this all removes the ability to have a sensible and legitimate conversation about DJI.
Elise Stefanik can go fuck herself for all the reasons listed elsewhere, lets get that on the table.
BUT we should be thoughtful, if not worried, about DJI. Here's a couple of reasons:
1) When the original Mavic Pro was released I showed mine to someone who had worked in US intelligence. His jaw dropped and said that based on other stuff he'd heard in his circles and now marrying it up with the product in his hands, it was clear IP that had been stolen from US DOD contractors and the government itself was in this device.
2) We know that the CCP has influence over all Chinese companies. I worked for Uber when we were operating in China and saw first hand the influence and access Chinese government had over operations and data. ANYONE who claims otherwise hasn't had first hand experience or is a shill (there's a lot of those around - there's more Chinese intelligence activity in Silicon Valley than in DC. I encountered that at Uber too.)
3) The amount of tracking that DJI can do and send home to China is concerning. Sensors, GPS and of course camera footage. When we worry about companies like Huawei intruding into our infrastructure, it's still at the data layer. DJI represents exposure into the kinetic layer which opens up all kinds of further vectors of concern.
4) These are being used for war, for now for the most part "on our side" (Ukraine) but DJI is already trying to disable some of that and is picking sides. Next time it might not be our side that wins the advantage.
5) You can't legislate "for the bad stuff" that could happen, which a few other commenters have suggested. The "bad stuff" would be happening on Chinese servers in China. It's out of jurisdiction. You buy a Chinese product like this, you're agreeing to the terms of engagement occurring outside of your friendly US/European jurisdictions. When this happens the only thing a country can do is ban the import, and here we are...
I have not bought the more recent versions of the DJI drones as I'm very conflicted on using DJI products based on what I know and what I can see up the road. I would love to pay 20-50% more for similar products from a US/Western company. I'm fine with them being manufactured in China but I want the company and the servers and the software operated in friendly countries (just like Apple).
(also, the voting on this comment is fascinating - lots of upvote and then suddenly a ton of downvotes. There's either lot of pro-Chinese brigading here or something else going on. If you disagree with my points please reply instead)
So Skydio?
Great for pro-use but they don't have hobby level products to compete with the DJI Mavic and Mini
Re: 2/3, why not just legislate on what data can be sent abroad, thereby rendering DJI ineligible to operate in the US market, rather than adding them to a ban list? And preferably go one further and enact more stringent data privacy protections _no matter the drone manufacturer_.
I think it's really telling that Congress has no appetite to tackle part of the root issue (that US data privacy laws don't go far enough because it might "hurt" domestic companies who indiscriminately vacuum up user data) and instead just takes the easy route. There have been too many hacks and leaks in recent years to trust even "friendly" companies.
"Within that bill is a small section that bans DJI from using the FCC frequencies"
So DJI drones as a whole aren't banned, just the parts that transmit?
I imagine it prevents any remote control from working if it prohibits "FCC frequencies".
But if you could control the DJI drone with some other transmitter, perhaps running OpenTX, and also replaced the video downlink, then there'd be no DJI hardware using those frequencies.
I'm surprised there's no language saying that they must be tethered
I cannot see how this will pass legal challenge. Banning a Drone Manufacturer simply because the manufacturer is Chinese?
There aren't ties to the Chinese military, are there?
There aren't ties to the Chinese military, are there?
From a practical perspective, it could be at any time. China hasn't embraced the free market the same way the west does, and doesn't give private companies the same degree of autonomy you're used to seeing elsewhere. Broadly speaking, if the Chinese government needs a company within their jurisdiction to cooperate with them, they can enforce cooperation.
As an example, even with publicly held companies, the Chinese government will take out "special management shares" that give the government positions on the board with unique power to direct management within a company and direct management decisions. It's not like the West where companies have theit own management that might disagree with the government and battle in court. In China, the government can simply become the management of a company.
That would be an after the fact justification, which could be used to justify banning any company that operates in China.
Not every company, just the ones with military relevance. But for the purposes of a national security discussion, the situation that is being planned for is not the current-state peacetime -- it is the after the fact contingency.
I'm not going to miss drones. Too many drone operators abused them to violate peoples expectation of quiet or privacy, or to harass animals, and were ignored or outright supported by other users. Laws restricting specific areas or behavior are extremely hard to enforce compared to an outright ban.
The most common defense was violating your privacy wasn't technically illegal. Well, now that it is going to become illegal, don't expect my support. This should serve as a reminder to people with niche hobbies not to make everyone hate you.
I just had some drone photos taken of damage on the roof of my house, and it's way easier than trying to get up 4 storeys with a ladder
No doubt.
In this thread, people not understanding that we've literally watched in the past year as consumer drones with IEDs attached to them have made the $10 million M1 Abrams tanks obsolete and what that means for war and its downstream implications for manufacturing bases.
Addendum: for anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1247403968/ukraine-pulls-abra...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/26/ukraine-wi...
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-abrams-tanks-1...
Although it should be noted that it's not DJI drones doing that damage. They seem to be used for spotting, while more DIY-style FPV drones are the ones blowing up tanks.
Of course, those parts likely also come from sources in China. However, the software is more along the lines of FOSS like ArduPilot or PX4.
It's interesting to see how the reactions differ between here and the articles on the ban on TikTok. And some even thought that the users who wrote to their government representatives were bots! Whenever the US bans or sanctions something, that impacts people, whether it's drone nerds or teens looking at silly videos. It just so happens that most people here seem to be outside of the TikTok target demographic, so we can't sympathize with a group that will be forcefully deprived of a perfectly functional product, but we can with the other.
What this thread and the tiktok thread really showed me is how many Chinese bots there are on HN.
Not everyone with an opinion you dislike is a bot.
Does this just ban importing DJI products (bad enough) or does it also ban owning and/or flying a DJI drone you already own? (really bad if that's the case, but also would be difficult to enforce)
It adds DJI to the FCC Covered List, meaning they can't get new FCC approvals. The FCC could choose whether or not to revoke existing FCC Equipment Authorizations for existing DJI drones.
If they do revoke the existing Equipment Authorizations, then the drones become illegal RF transmitters and wouldn't be legal to fly, although enforcement would border on impossible.
The text specifically calls out that software and "services" are to be banned: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864...
Since the software phones home it most likely won't work anymore once the ban is in effect.
GoPro should enter the drone market.
I vaguely remember GoPro having a drone model at one point. But it didn't do well?
Wider implications beyond just the consumer drone market. My company and several of our clients (who are all much larger companies than us) have $100,000s - $X,000,000s of DJI enterprise drones, batteries, and payloads (Matrice 300, 350, zenmuse p1 camera, etc)
I know the bill still has to go through the senate, but this is going to be a sore subject for a lot of American companies who use DJI equipment.
No reason for the Senate to not vote it into law. There are no lobbyists telling them to do otherwise. In an election year, they desperately need to show that they can get something, anything passed.
DJI owns Hasselblad. It will be interesting to see if Hasselblad get hit by this as well. Not that I want to see it, just curious if there may be collateral damage.
Fingers crossed it doesn't, would hate to see it go down.
I have no need for a drone right now, but looks like I'm now in the market for DJI drones, one or two.
That's how banned book sales work in China: the books don't sell well until the government bans them, and then everyone wants them after that (and can easily get them since China's black market is pretty open).
I'm curious if Anzu Robotics would be permitted under the ban. For those unfamiliar, they use DJI Mavic 3 hardware manufactured in Malaysia with US-written software: https://www.therobotreport.com/anzu-robotics-launches-u-s-ba...
They shouldn't be; they use DJI basebands, so banning DJI and their affiliates using the FCC Covered List should also prevent Anzu from getting new FCC equipment approvals. It's unclear whether the FCC would revoke existing approvals, although it certainly seems like what Congress wants. And if they do, it's unclear if they'd go to the effort to hunt down Anzu and Cogito, but on paper, they certainly should.
By the way, there's no US-written software on Anzu drones. They're just green Mavic 3 Enterprises with a phone app that integrates the DJI SDK. Flying a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise and an Anzu Raptor using Aloft Air Control will produce exactly identical results in terms of American-ness and data transfer.
Is this going eventually impact TV companies like LG , Samsung and such? I bet there are more Chinese made devices already spread worldwide because of reasons….
LG & Samsung are South Korean companies, not Chinese, so they aren't a target (yet).
We should ban Creality and Bambu Lab too. Imagine if we also strangled consumer 3D printing for dumb reasons. You should only be allowed to print on $100k+ Stratasys for natsec reasons, of course.
Creality/Bambu killed more small companies (and Reprap) than it bothered Stratasys IMHO.
But yes...there very well may be a security concern there too. Bambu sends/receives info from the companies servers. At least once this has allowed a supposed firmware update to cause a large number of printers to start printing uncommanded. This is a major safety and security risk and it was largely ignored by the consumer community due to Bambu "making things easier".
So yeah...perhaps we should start looking into these companies...and exactly where their subsidies do/may come from.
I tried to find a non-Chinese router last week.
They don't exist.
Draytek.
This protectionism is just getting ridiculous now. You can't ship most manufacturing jobs overseas and expect china not to out compete eventually. Yes they are stealing ip, who cares, japan did the same thing. Trying to stop in now is just going to cause another depression.
Claiming DJI stole IP though is ridiculous. They have been so far ahead for so long anything they might have stolen ~15 years ago is surely obsolete.
so usa congress admits chinese drones are better ?
but maybe (or now)
usa senate must admit that they can keep up with china in drone manufacturing speed !?
this is in adition to tiktok, but then I wonder how much of what amazon sales is made in china
What will be good alternatives to DJI then?
This is the best present ever to everyone else in the world who is buying DJI drones by the thousands right now.
The reason the US doesn't have a real domestic drone industry is partly due to the FAA cracking down hard on the drone community.
"The bill as it stands does not provide any compensation to those that could be affected by this ban, if it is retroactive."
This is frustrating.
“It’s complicated”.
populist shot on the foot
Wait what lol
Nothing is going to save the failing empire and this is just another signpost on the road to it's demise.
Once again the US government dances around the broader issue of data privacy.
I understand it’s easier to get people to vote against Chinese products in the US on data privacy concerns but it’s irritating that Congress isn’t working on legislating rules for products that are not Chinese as well.
In 2016, Tesla released the Model 3. When Chinese consumers wanted the most advanced electric vehicles, the Chinese government communicated with Tesla in 2017 about building a factory in Shanghai to produce China-made Teslas. Currently, Tesla is the highest-selling pure electric vehicle brand in China ( Model Y sales in China in December last year were 60,055 volumes ) The intense competition in the electric vehicle market has fostered the development of high-quality Chinese EV brands such as NIO, Li Auto, XPeng, BYD, Zeekr, Xiaomi, Aion... ... In contrast, in the free and democratic America market, the response to competition in the drone market has been to ban DJI, and the response to competition in the short video market has been to ban tiktok. Let’s see in ten years which market environment will foster advanced productivity.
Their line of thinking maybe that firmware updates can basically do anything
Dji is like samsung; great hardware ruined by owner-hostile software. I will never buy either unless I can load standard open source software on them.
I can't wait for right to repair and similar laws force these delusional companies to actually hand over control of products to their rightful owners.
Bad governing, and it only continues to get worse here. My decision to retire in a 2nd or 3rd world country is becoming clearer every election cycle.
We can ban DJI all we want, but our military or the US itself is declining nonetheless if we don't solve our manufacturing problem like we still produce those lame suicidal drones rogue1 that has inferior spec to DJI Mavic 3 yet charges fucking $94K a pop, like the cost of making a canon shell is 10X more than Russian even though Russia is known to be one of the most corrupted country in the world, like we don't have a prosperous manufacturing industry to rely on so the cost of a specialized screw could be hundreds times more than what what China produces.
I mean, we can have the best service industry in the world, but eventually we have to produce good things, no? Or in the worst case, if there's war, what do we depend on? Traders and programmers and lawyers and waiters? Are we sure we could out produce the Axis 20:1, like building a warship every 3 days (or a week?)?
It pains me to see the US decline just like the Roman Empire did.
This is an interesting experiment in economic protectionism. Depending how far is the US drone industry in a few year we'll see this measure repeated
Is there anything competitive thats even remotely close to DJI?
Sad to see the US fall further into nationalism and protectionism when it comes to better Chinese products rather than promoting competition in the US markets.
Related:
DJI Seems to Believe That It Is Possible Its Drones Will Be Banned - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40609973 - June 2024 (1 comment)
DJI might get banned next in the US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171565 - April 2024 (81 comments)
In a first, FAA rescinds DJI drone's Remote ID compliance status - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36732256 - July 2023 (6 comments)
Pentagon Puts DJI on Blacklist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150567 - Oct 2022 (188 comments)
US will ban investment in 8 Chinese companies, including DJI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566125 - Dec 2021 (10 comments)
GOP’s top FCC official calls for ban on DJI drone sales in US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28951488 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
FCC Official calls for ban on DJI drones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28939517 - Oct 2021 (4 comments)
US Government adds DJI to commerce blacklist over ties to Chinese government - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25468406 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Drone firm DJI promises 'local data mode' to fend off US government's mooted ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444443 - Sept 2020 (102 comments)
Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15820987 - Dec 2017 (72 comments)
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Side note on the current post: usually we downweight "bill goes through intermediate state change" stories because they tend to be follow-ups [1] rather than significant new information [2]. That is, the discussion tends to be substantively the same at each step. I've made an exception in this case because there (maybe) hasn't been too much discussion of this one so far.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Slightly off-topic, but it reminds me of the Tesla restriction around governmental buildings in China last year, citing the same set of reasons (data collection, national security, etc.). It seems that the restriction was lifted recently [1].
[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/china-lifts-tesla-restrictions-pa...
So what recourse would the public have to get compensation from the government for their now-useless consumer drones?
Interesting knock-on effect to RID of this goes through.
DJI isn't just a drone company. They've been actively moving into audio/video production very rapidly. If this ban sticks, they will lose their FCC license, and your Pocket 3 camera (or any DJI device) will no longer be able to connect to your phone.
There’s no reason for the US to allow any business with a nation that not only has named the US as an enemy state multiple times, but also regularly breaks international law against friendly countries, for example, in the south China sea. The US and European Union should formally sanction China.
So the amendment/act [0] makes a change to "47 U.S. Code § 1601 - Determination of communications equipment or services posing national security risks" [1] to add DJI. Although the direct inclusion of an entity in US code is odd, it does follow from the 2019 NDAA (Sec. 889. Prohibition on certain telecommunications and video surveillance services or equipment. "...Huawei Technologies Company or ZTE Corporation...") which included based on that bill's text.
It's a bit odd. Isn't DJI selling lots of drones to Ukraine and Russia?
(possibly through middlemen so they have trouble preventing it, but still)
I've put off picking up a drone. Should I hurry up and get one now?
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
Off the top of my head as a non-European: GDPR, 2-year warranties and other consumer protection laws
Oh, those pesky consumers getting in the way of the innovation of the free market with their protections. If only they could be fully exploited for maximum value extraction without interference.
This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.
And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home, 70+ yo still working their ass off in McJobs, crumbling public infrastructure, homeless and billionaires laughing all the way to the bank...
Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP or the presence of billionaires and unicorns, as if between you, Zuck, and Musk you have an average wealth of $500B. There are much poorer GDP-wise countries where people live better and are happier than the US :)
The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough to compare. Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US.
Most of the top colleges are American. American homes tend to be much larger and nice than European homes.
The distribution is really not that skewed. In most states, median income is within 40% of mean income.
Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
No. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
By median, the US is on par with Italy. If you adjust for property prices (cheaper in Italy), then it's definitively lower.
How about the median Western European (including nordic)?
Yes, because that's where the money and companies are. Those concern a miniscule minority of the population - with most either not having access to education, or only through huge personal debt. And even there, take away the majority Europeans, Asians, Indians, etc doing the research in these (after having been educated in their local countries), and it would be a wasteland.
The UK had better healthcare than the US for the average person, it only fell behind because of opening itself up too much because of immigration (without sufficient funding increases) and also because of following US-like neoliberal policies in the past 20 years or so that hurt the NHS.
Not exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead. And this doesn't adjust for property prices.
Yep! And the European countries behind include like ex-soviet bloc countries and such (basically starting from very low in 1989-1991). And as you not, the cost differences (not accounted in the table) push European countries even further than this ranking.
Besides mean vs median, I'd point also quality of life factors not measured in dollars or euros.
People die from inability to afford something as fundamental as healthcare in the US. You are poorer than any European ever could be.
Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
Most Americans grumble about paying for healthcare, and we are getting ripped off, but it's also very rare for someone to actually die because they can't afford it. Anyone in the top, say, 80% of American society has some form of employer-subsidized insurance.
These words are doing some very heavy lifting.
This is due to the garbage GDP numbers. Based on these, the quality of life in the Mississippi is better than in Japan. Not a single chance. The US numbers are highly inflated by the financial sector and real estate. It'll take a financial crisis and dethroning of US dollar to show how truly poor these places are.
Source? Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
Yes, yes, and no (irrelevant because it barely shifts the result)
GDP and GDP PPP are almost irrelevant with regards to personal wealth or lack thereof. A factory making billions to its owner doesn't improve the revenues, wealth or standard of living of more than 1 person. A factory producing luxury Louis Vuitton handbags is good for GDP and the wealth of the factory owner, but is irrelevant to the living conditions of the workers. A private equity firm making wild bets is very "productive", GDP wise, but again , entirely irrelevant at a personal level. Even the worker's salary is tough to compare in isolation between countries because of the vastly different costs of living - an American having to pay tens of thousands of student loans back, with obscene housing prices, absurdly expensive healthcare... $200k/year in San Francisco might not get you as far as e.g. 100€k/year in Berlin (throwing numbers for illustration, haven't actually done the math).
Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
I’m an American. I wish we had these protections.
Billionaires making more money sure helps pay my hospital bills.
That's exactly what I think when I read one of these "EU stifles innovation" comments. It sounds to me like the equivalent of not wanting socialized healthcare because "the poors" might get it, not caring about the fact that you're the one who will benefit.
This is the "everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" of consumer rights. Everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed capitalist overlord.
This is a strawman.
"Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it".
Also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is another strawman, used by those who dislike capitalism. People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
That's fair, I should have said "because the poors might benefit". Rich people don't like socialized healthcare because they, by definition, will pay for people who can't afford it.
The problem is when people who will benefit from this identify with people who will lose from it.
They do, but here we're talking about the opposite: People being against policies they benefit from, because they identify with the group that will not.
P.S. I liked your comment, it was a reasoned reply that furthers the debate, thank you.
You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way.
The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are: First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and;
Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in general hard to get excited about tax increases. The financial concern is in the taking, not in the getting.
I'm afraid your experiences are not universal.
There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is due to their level of deserving (Just World Fallacy), it's very easy to extend that to "and therefore we shouldn't try to help poor people; they're just being punished for being bad people."
There is a wide gap between not wanting to be responsible for helping the poor and actively wanting the poor to fail. You're confusing the two.
You're right about the first part, but I'm not confused about anything.
There are genuinely many people who wholeheartedly believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and that helping them is bad. Some of them aren't even that well off themselves, but have bought into an ideology that's detrimental to them.
If you haven't encountered these people, then count yourself lucky, but don't try to deny their existence or assume your own experiences are universal.
Clearly people of every ilk exist, but my claim is that people like this are irrelevant to the debate around socialized healthcare. Show me an American politician who's run on the platform of openly wanting to hurt the poor because they deserve to be hurt, their electoral victory, and that person's vote against a socialized healthcare initiative. It's not a thing.
Regan's "welfare queen" comes to mind. More recent examples were those against stimulus checks (but very much for PPP "loans"). Any politician who believes in means-testing, when the bureaucracy adds an overhead greater than the amount saved is arguably out to hurt the undeserving.
You can't deny the politics of retribution exists, because politicians only give oblique references to it; voters certainly believe it, hence one voter who complained about Covid shutdowns thusly: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be"
The resistance to socialized healthcare in America can be easily understood without resorting to bizarre strawmen about hating poor people. Healthcare is of course a huge part of our economy and lives. Many (most?) people are satisfied with the status quo and are hesitant to see (what they consider to be) a huge increase in government power, spending, and general involvement in their lives. It's the same impulse that motivates people to oppose new housing -- people are loss averse and hate change.
Will it be a huge increase in spending? Isn't it estimated to reduce costs by a lot?
We do not have an established history of accurately predicting or managing the costs of overwhelmingly expensive government programs, at least here in the US.
The US already runs two government healthcare programs. There are 65 million people in Medicare and 83 million in Medicaid. For less money per patient than private insurance.
I think they mean it's an increase in government spending, which would of course be true even if overall healthcare overhead spending is reduced.
Yes, the resistance is because the private sector will lose a lot of (parasitic) jobs. It's a non-starter to attempt to reduce health insurance companies power, because it would gut their employee numbers.
It's an unsavory thought, but the US has a significant amount of people employed in the business of denying healthcare to other people, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Any politician attempting to fix this would be committing political suicide.
What an utterly ridiculous response. In your eyes, businesses should be able to run roughshod over the consumer? Yes, maybe the laws could have been more polished or have been implemented in a better way, but the underlying idea of protecting the consumer is the important takeaway from these laws.
to also be fair, I just recently returned from Europe and I was shocked at how maddeningly frustrating it was to simply use the Web. Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms and outright blocks on Websites from EU consumers, it was a wild look at what Europeans have to go through under the guise of consumer protections.
Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.
As much as the idea of GDPR (and specifically cookie consent) is well intentioned, the actual laws themselves aren't great. Cookie consent is especially frustrating because it encourages the creators of the consent popups to use dark patterns to try and trick people into just accepting them.
Cookie consent only apply to non-necessary cookies.
The laws are great because every cookie consent form is essentially saying, "we as a company want you to accept a cookie that is unnecessary."
If you don't install unnecessary cookies, you don't need to have a consent form.
Correct, but unfortunately that applies to the vast majority of websites. It wouldn't be so bad if the consent dialogs had an option to reject all optional cookies but unfortunately too many of them still try and trick or force you into accepting all cookies.
As is explicitly required by law
Yep, but there are still plenty out there which do not. The likelihood of them being forced to correct this is essentially nil though.
Yeah, that's the main issue I have: the enforcement of the law is lagging/lacking
There’s a different issue here: lawyers and companies are often concerned that what they deem necessary will be deemed unnecessary when challenged. So, they require cookie consent preemptively to avoid liability in case they get it wrong.
There's no chance in hell those 2761 "partners" that ask for user data are ever necessary
Do you think the official EU site uses unnecessary cookies? https://european-union.europa.eu/
1. Yes it does
2. It clearly explains which cookies it uses in the linked policy page
3. It has an opt-out that is as easy as the opt-in (as required by law)
Hell, a lot of the 3rd party companies who are contracted to build the cookie consent forms are even following the spirit of the law (barely) by including a one click "reject all" button or link in the pop ups. They are often somewhat downplayed, like being in a smaller font or slightly hidden, because fuck you, but are you really so damn lazy that clicking "reject all" once every hour is such an objectionable activity that you'd rather just dump any and all consumer protections of data?
Not under the guise. They are consumer protections. As a European, I like them very much.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs. There are even many websites that don’t need the notices as they don’t use cookies for tracking a natural person (their cookies are not associated with personally identifiable information).
So we can choose what we use because we are informed.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs.
The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.
None of which are required by GDPR. In fact, those obtrusive "consent" forms are usually violations of GDPR.
Imagine if companies didn't collect copious amounts of user data and didn't try to use every trick in the book and all known dark patterns to make you give up that data.
"We care about privacy by selling your data to 2765 'partners' and are blaming GDPR for this"
How about not allowing "1579 partners" to track every click on your website?
AFAIK many cookie consent banners are actually against the law. IIUC denying any non-essential cookies should always be as easy as accepting all cookies. This is something many cookie banners have not managed.
So to me this seems more like the tech-companies and websites being annoying at implementing an easy solution, in order to rebel against the laws and make people angry at it for the inconvenience, then the law itself being bad.
(https://measuredcollective.com/why-your-cookie-banner-is-pro...)
To be fair to them, i think it was sarcasm.
On HN, you can be sure there are several people who literally believe the world would be better without any regulations or laws forcing businesses to do anything. This place is the pinnacle of anarcho-capitalism.
at least here there's a spectrum of views that largely get by peacefully, and the entire place isn't focused on that conflict, a la twitter. yes there are lot of right-wing headcases entirely taken up by their own bottom-line, and yes the place itself is broadly funded and owned by people who think like, or at the very least, act like anarcho-capitalists, but they only really float to the surface when a post about regulation comes up, and even then, the discussion stays mostly civil. it could be a lot worse
It could be worse of course, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind when using this site. I really think it should be a publicly-posted disclaimer.
You may well be right, or at least I hope you are anyway.
Poe's Law applies
GDPR is really sensible legislation that largely only applies to companies who should be treating your personal data as sensitive data. I built a GDPR complaint system and was really happy about the security we put in place that we definitely wouldn’t have thought to do without these laws. Things like having someone you can ask and request personal data from at big companies is also an extremely well thought through idea. I don’t understand the issues people have with it to be honest…
Most people have no problem with the GDPR. It only seems otherwise on this forum and similar echo chambers / bubbles where lots of people made their fortunes with adtech.
I love the intention of the law, but it's so... flexible... in implementation that shitty implementers ended up making the browsing experience horrible with intrusive pop-ups and geo blocking.
On mobile every page load ends up with me spending the first minute or so on page dealing with the half-screen "don't sell my info" cookie dance, followed with the ad-block pop-ups.
It usually isn't the law's job to dictate an implementation.
How is the law that doesn't even talk about browsers or cookies responsible for this?
My only complaint with GDPR is when I have to do boring work in the name of GDPR compliance :)
But it's also driven some pretty interesting projects, so I'd probably call it a wash or perhaps a slight positive, even if I were to ignore the major benefits as a consumer
:-)
Lol, as a European, thank god that people like you don't make our laws here
It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online advertisement.
They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing.
It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it.
Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.
What's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?
Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.
I’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.
Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals.
Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
No? This is exactly the opposite of why companies exist, they are specifically there to increase the stock price via development of their products. That we get better happiness via rising wealth standards is just a coincidence, albeit a very useful and historically true coincidence. And even then, companies can last quite a while trudging along but it will stop at some point if new innovation is not kept up in the form of new companies (as older companies are usually at capacity for hiring). Look at the youth unemployment rate in many European countries compared to the US.
Changing a measure does not change the underlying thing it's measuring, no more than I can time travel by changing a clock. Obviously people are talking about what those numbers represent, not the numbers themselves. GDP is a useful enough concept as I mentioned above, one that correlates well to overall citizen wealth. Europeans are generally quite a bit poorer than Americans, even with the addition of the value of free (or rather, "free") healthcare. Tech employees are even more so advantaged, as their health insurance is excellent while they make multiples of their European counterparts. It is not "libertarian" to acknowledge this fact, and it's one of the main reasons you see many European tech people moving to the US and Silicon Valley.
Right, that's why at the heart of the tech innovation peple are running from mentally ill homeless people the insulating themselves in gated communities to pretend like living in a german village. Huge success.
I wouldn't obsess too much with the GDP too, its not as good as a proxy to the important stuff as people are trying to make it. An appendicitis surgery generates much more economic activity in USA than in Europe and Americans don't end with better appendixes.
The homeless people is a regulation failure, other cities have much better ways of dealing with them, California simply doesn't want to.
GDP is a good measure in general, because again, economic activity is correlated with higher outcomes. See China now versus 100 years ago.
If you paid me just the difference between a US and European Google software engineer salary, I’d be willing to run from homeless people all day
Besides, that’s why americans have cars to insulate them from the unwashed masses
Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6)
[1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former.
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/
I’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.
This is called handwaving away an inconvenient truth.
The highest HDI in the world is possessed by dozens of counties in the US. The lowest in the US is on par with... Poland.
Vacation time.
If we are talking about tech companies, as stated in the great-grandparent comment, tech employees in the US have as much or more vacation time as Europeans. I can easily take multi-month vacations if I so choose (with some prior planning and assent of course), and that is a similar story for other tech employees too. The difference is that we just get paid much more for the same work.
They are allocated a good number of PTO hours, but Americans are really bad at taking them. I also could take that long of a vacation too, technically, but I never have and realistically never would.
I guess, that's on them then. One could say the same of those types of Europeans who don't take vacation either. Personally I'm taking everything I'm allocated.
Pfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s
The full phrase is "vacation time in Europe".
I know a bunch of FAANG engineers that retired in their 30s and 40s, so the rest of their life is vacation time...
I bet the hardware you're running on wants to have a word.
Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too.
ASML
Aren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...
Except Intel, all the hardware is produced in Taiwan or abroad at TSMC.
Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML.
Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though.
Planes: Well, Airbus, duh.
If you zoom in on the just the hardware production market then yes sure, although that seems more an artifact of a small number of highly specialized manufacturers than evidence of startup friendliness, otherwise I'd expect to see a bunch of competing manufacturers rather than a handful of huge ones.
In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole.
But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction.
As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.
Well. It's not about the cheapest place where to get business done. I doubt it's the US fyi...
It's where the money is there in large numbers for the bang per buck.
Additionally: Natural resources ( middle east) or continents that are not land locked with bad actors ( almost everywhere outside of the US / Canada).
Additionally, 1 language/culture to rule them all has an incredible benefit compared to Europe.
Just my POV fyi. Coming from Belgium, 10 million people and 3 official languages. An European tax number is relatively new too.
Adyen
Revolut
GoCardless
Shift
Vinted
…
Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.
I don't know why the parent is calling out those companies, strange list.
Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.
Say all you want about "speculative public trading stocks", but I trust public markets' pricing more than private markets[1] or the government[2].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-26/what-h...
[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/c...
Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy.
According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...
Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.
US is stil ahead in some stuff but the list is getting smaller as the market caps getting bigger and people "richer".
I'm not claiming it is, just that it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives.
Arguably all of those is more due to government intervention than the companies themselves. Nuclear is impossible to build in the US due to overburdensome regulations, infrastructure/transportation is impossible to build due to NIMBY-friendly planning rules, electric cars are massively subsidized by the Chinese government.
Right, China achieve all this thanks to its libertarian low touch low regulation small government and only if the stock prices of the American companies go a bit higher and the government is a tad less regulated they will do even better than the Chinese.
Not all regulation is bad, but also, not all regulation is good. Regulation is meaningless in a vacuum. I support more consumer protection regulation, but also, I support YIMBYism [0] which is a deregulatory model that wants to remove restrictions on housing, which were largely made by corporations and NIMBYs who don't want their property values to go down if new housing is built. YIMBYism is actually very similar to how Europe builds their housing, via mixed zone development.
It is the same with your comment, saying that it's only libertarians or those who want low regulation is a strawman, it depends on exactly which type of regulation. China can achieve some things with its big government ways, but it can't achieve everything. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement
It's not objective in the least. Stock markets are pure speculation.
The economic case for nuclear is mostly what keeps it from being built in the USA. The USA built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 70s/80s, and they didn't really pay off even with the government providing free insurance coverage. Likewise, today it is even harder to make the case for a new nuclear power plant since renewables are much cheaper on a kW basis.
Chinese regulation is neither too high nor too low. It would be impossible to build a nuclear plant if the government didn't firmly back it, otherwise there are no barriers that it can't ignore.
There's no speculative stocks in Europe? Seriously? I guess if you ignore all the stock markets in Europe, sure?
Also, it's funny that you mention Goebels. It's ironic even when you repeat the same tropes about the US and how it's supposedly beholden to the capital markets and speculators.
Europe has its giants. Europe usually does not attack its giants. That's why you get megacorps like Maersk or Airbus or Volkswagen. The entire point is that it only attacks other giants (ie, not homegrown giants), hence the focus on legislation that mostly affects them but leaves European corporations mostly unscathed. Or why green legislation curiously doesn't affect German coal extraction (what a coincidence!) that much. Or all the other double standards Europe and some Europeans love so much.
The delusion here is this weird narrative of good, noble Europeans who are somehow only guilty of not being greedy.
Europe is far from noble, just different mentality and expectations from life. VW keep saying that next year VW Golf robotaxis are coming and not delivering wouldn't fly, therefore we don't have crazy stock prices.
Airbus keeps making good quality planes that don't fall from the skies, selling those then flying around. It's alright, I don't know why the government should attack Airbus but maybe the US government should have kept Boeing in check.
Europeans have their ways and Americans have theirs. Let's keep it like that and not put all the eggs in the same basket, as it appears that Chinese came up with another hugely successful economy model.
Sure but that wasn't the main thrust of what I was replying to. Also, I guess it only has its own Wireguards or (if we want to talk about inflated promises instead of outright fraud) hundreds of start up like Qwant that promised to challenge the big American man in (2) more weeks or just a few more subsidies.
The only difference is that we hear a lot more about American success and failures as they are sadly utterly dominant in media presence way beyond their own borders. And Europe seems much more likely to just keep its skeletons hidden in its closet, and tries to talk about them as little as possible.
(For example,see how the German regulators dealt with Wireguard by going after the journalists that sounded the alarm for years. Or how Europeans love to discuss American issues like racism while ignoring how much worse the issue can be in their own backyard. Or the commenters here that recoil at any criticism of the EU and invent some conspiracy where said criticism obviously comes from. I never see any American accuse Europeans of being behind sentiment that is critical of the US.)
Americans love to be very loud about their issues, for better or for worse.
Late correction: I meant wirecard, not wireguard!
The current conflict with China has the benefit that it dropped all of them masks off. You'd be labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggested otherwise to the narrative of the free trading liberal west.
Now that the emperor is fully naked; colonialism never ceased to exist, it just took a different form. The next decade is going to be very interesting, and not in a good way.
I had always assumed that the UK killed it's tech industry by selling it all off for short term gain. That needs regulation to prevent.
IMHO it has nothing to do with the governments, in Europe there's no that kind of money and the investor mentality is very different than the Americans and the European culture is much less accommodating to failure.
It's the European way to roll, the Brits are trying to be a bit more like the Americans but its worlds apart. The American spirit is something else, I wish we had it in Europe but maybe its not compatible at all with the European way of life. So, if you feel adventurous, motivated and ambitious you go to USA to make it big.
I recently moved to Spain, after having lived in the US for a decade. It's only been a month for me and I definitely see the over-reaching over-regulation of EVERYTHING in the EU.
It's so much that it literally pushes young people to have a non-risk taking mindset. I have a friend who has some knife sharpening and tooling skills and she's been figuring how to do something with this (some kind of a business). I suggested why not get a garage and get the machinery you want and get started. She listed down all the regulations and how even thinking about it is not allowed.
Starting a business/startups is hard. The EU just adds 10-20 more hurdles to cross to get even with the US startup ecosystem. At least that's been my observation in the few weeks.
That's probably not an EU thing, you should consider an EU country more suitable to your line of business. Or you know, just do your thing don't bother with the regulations and pay a fine if it becomes a problem some time in the future?
Apparently Spaniards like it this way, they live long healthy lives in the system they set up for themselves.
I'm not talking about drone legislation here in Europe, but state overreach in tech in general + bad scene for startups compared to the US (for now...) due to politics.
Any concrete examples you are referring to?
Can start with the number of unicorns in USA vs Europe, especially when you take population in to account https://www.failory.com/unicorns
That isn't a concrete example of a regulations that hinder innovation.
What do you think the cause is? Unwashed eggs?
any number of reasons: language barriers, existing American firms anti-competing, smaller domestic markets, less centralisation, and, yes, in some cases, regulation, but, when it comes down to it, it's better to have smaller firms that don't (or less frequently) damage society than larger firms than do, even just from the perspective of wealth distribution.
I'm not sure about that - I really like my lifestyle which would be nearly impossible to attain in Europe, but is very attainable for Americans.
I don't see how you're materially better off because you're forced to use foreign companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) instead of having your own.
What are you talking about? I am unable to follow your reasoning, maybe you can walk us through?
I think he's saying that, yes, this regulation means that your own companies are more ethical, but European consumers end up using these less-regulated American companies anyway. this is true, but this problem has started to be solved by the EU anyway, for example, with the Digital Markets and Services Acts
Why are you asking me? And what does 'Unicorns' have to do with innovation anyway?
How many of those unicorns are financial black holes never expecting to turn a profit?
And the inclusion of so many cryptocurrency "unicorns" in that list is also quite telling.
So Estonia is better than the US?
The bi annual push for chat control (key „escrow”)
Granted the chat control issue, is unfortunate on the privacy front, however I wouldn't call it a hindrance on innovation.
IMO, often innovation happens because it is motivated to work around rules and regulations. So in many cases regulation and rules are what drives innovation. People want to hack the system and thus have to innovate. A completely hacked and open system doesn't really inspire new ideas, because the old ones just work fine already.
You're talking about innovations in "working around the system." These are often orthogonal to innovations in actual tech.
The US had an entire decade of war on cryptography that was literally required to safely transact on the internet, and yet the 90s had plenty of online store startups.
Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe. Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.
Which, I will note, is fine. It’s optimised for stability, not wealth. On the other hand, it naturally means having to choose between American and Chinese tech giants.
Which Europe? All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus?
This is true, because the EU is composed of 20+ different countries, each with different languages, cultures, histories, priorities. It's impossible to remove that boundary.
Each of them can be done online in most countries. All, very few. I think only Estonia comes to mind. (At least one form in that process requires visiting a notary in most of Western Europe.)
The cost of terminating an employee is also a unique risk that European firms have to capitalise for which American start-ups do not. Again, I understand why one would choose this stability. But it comes with a cost.
It's absolutely possible by mandating a lingua franca. But it would cause irreparable damage to those cultures, which is why the EU--sensibly, in my opinoin--has chosen to preserve them. But this is a choice and it comes with costs.
Spain still has not succededed after triying for centuries. Italy has "dialects" [1]. I'm not sure about the local detaild of the other countries.
[1] A dialect is a language without a flag or a float.
I've heard offhand here that the ease of starting a business in general is easier in the US and that funding for tech startups is more available in the US due to policy.
Totally hearsay from me.
Regulation isn't going to stop innovation that much, or the tech industry wouldn't be in california. The primary difference is that the US is one homogenous, huge market.
If I build something in California, to California's laws, and it becomes a success, I can immediately sell it across the entire rest of the US, and I can expand across the US, using the same employment contracts as in california, same lawyers as in california, etc.
Sure, later on I can save money by making the Delaware version of my product with more cancerous chemicals, or have stricter NDAs in my Florida contracts.
But if I start with California regulations, I can expand to the entire US with a small team of employees.
There's nothing like that in Europe. If my product works in Germany, I'll need a french, spanish, italian translation to sell it in these countries. I can't just hire people from these countries either — they've got different holidays, different work hours, different unions I'll have to deal with. Different tax codes and agencies. And often these are conflicting with one another.
In the US, I need one or two support shifts in one or two languages. In the EU I need 27. In the US, I need one version of the product, with one plug. In the EU, unless I'm okay with 10A and a plastic chassis, I need a dozen different versions.
And even if the product can be used universally, European culture is significantly more diverse than US culture.
Is a phone call at 7am or 8pm more appropriate? Depends on whether you're in Germany or Spain. When a job applicant includes a photo of themselves and lists their parents' degrees and jobs on their own CV, is that appropriate or not? In Germany, that's often expected, in many other regions, a huge no-go.
To be successful in the US, I need to build one company. To be successful in the EU, I need to build a multinational corporation with 27 local branches.
Also since national markets in Europe are relatively big by themselves a lot of companies tend to be satisfied with comfort of a single market success.
And once you've got control of one EU country, expanding to another EU country is just as complicated as expanding to the US is.
So if you're spending the same effort anyway, expanding to the US with 300 million people is much more profitable than expanding to Germany with 80 million people, or the Netherlands with 20 million people.
Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
Which is verifiably false.
Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?
There's literally a section on the Wikipedia article detailling how it launched in a handful of countries, expanded to the US, and only then expanded to most of the EU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Geographic_availabilit...
Spotify launched in Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, followed by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
After the US expansion, Spotify finally expanded to Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland
That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
You'd never see a US company launching e.g. only for Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada, expanding to China, and only afterwards become available in the remaining states.
They launched in 7 countries before launching in the US. In the same year as they launched in the US they also launched in 4 other countries.
In 2012, after their "expansion" in the US they had five times as many paying users outside the US as in the US.
I edited the comment with a few more numbers, if you'd like to re-read it.
All that matters is the original comment: "Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order."
Where reality is Spotify became available in 7 countries before attempting to expand in the US.
Which is, funnily, what you literally wrote in your edit:
Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
Sure, but they still decided to expand to the US, despite a worse outlook, before expanding to the remaining EU countries. As said, you'd never see a US company do that.
The US is a large, rich homogeneous market with a population of over 300 million. There's no wonder foreign companies want to get a foothold in this market, and it's no wonder US companies don't tend to look outside of the US until there's nothing to do in the US.
I don't think anyone disagrees about that.
Sure, but that's exactly my point: The primary factor limiting EU startups isn't regulation, it's that they don't have access to a large, homogeneous, monolinguistic market
You’re discounting the fact that there’s plenty of internal movement in Europe - I worked with a French firm that had a bunch of Italians, some Swiss, an Englishman, two Spaniards and a bunch of Russians working there along with the French people, all living around and working in their Paris office.
It wouldn’t be that hard to find people to translate your app and provide support in the major languages in most large European cities.
In the US, you don't have to find people to translate your app and provide support in other languages at all. It would help if you did this for Spanish though, but that's it.
California's tech industry works because there is a long-established tradition of lawbreaking in California. We pass all these regulations, and then ignore them. Sometimes the more enlightened legislators put in explicit carve-outs for businesses of less than 50 employees or a $B in revenue, so that startups don't have to actually break the law, they can just ignore it. But they're going to ignore it anyway, so the carve outs really serve the law's benefit rather than the startup.
In practice, the way California tech startups work is
Steps #5-6 aren't limited to a particular state. At that point, you have buckets of money anyway, so you contort your company structure and product into a configuration that is legal in as many jurisdictions as possible, including internationally.Sure, but that's not any different in EU. Lobbyism exists here, too.
But the social differences of the two markets remain.
That someone can buy new DJI drones in europe is right, but only the latest releases. You cannot use any of the drones you might have purchased over the last years anymore in europe because of the new regulations.
I don't think that's true. You just need some new firmware or something, no?
I think the situation is far more nuanced than what will be debateable here, but I've had friends that tried to do tech startups in Europe and ended up moving to the US and doing it here. This is surely not a representative sample so take with a grain of salt, but generally speaking this is their (paraphrased) analysis:
In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched.
Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.
I suspect you're over-egging the amount of compliance that needs to be done and under-egging the filter of the existing big players mostly being American, who buy up competitors in order to maintain market dominance
Most hardware has no reason to require direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work. If some device requires internet access, then it cannot be trusted to not transmit personal data, therefore it should be possible to replace the software on that device, so that something that is trusted by the consumer can be installed.
While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requirement makes it uncontrollable by the consumer, so I do understand that some consumers or, the possible more security aware US, will not trust it. But for the same reason China and other countries might not trust Apple or similar.
Trust is something that needs to be earned and which has to go both ways, if a company doesn't trust their users, and prevents people using their bought products however they like, then why should their users trust the company and let their uncontrollable software record their private lives and possible report back to them?
While I agree with you, I doubt banning Chinese tech will remedy this problem. My experience is that American brands are much, much more aggressive about making you connect to the internet, install our apps, create an account, subscribe to our newsletter etc.
Look at the difference between iRobot and Chinese robot vacuums on Amazon - the difference is night and day.
This whataboutism ignores one very important point.
When you connect a device to an American company they might do things that we consider privacy violations, while still staying generally within the bounds of the law. We like to joke about data going to the NSA or something, but in the extremely limited cases where it does protections exist with oversight.
Contrast this to Chinese companies where by law every company is part-owned by the government itself. The Ministry of State Security literally has employees who show up to these companies every day like normal workers, but their job is to find and exploit intelligence on foreign individuals and businesses.
The idea of running any internet-connected software with a push-update mechanism, built and controlled by a company in a country without a strong independent rule of law, should terrify far more people than it apparently does.
This is one of those 'It's not a problem until it is a problem, and then it's a big fucking problem' scenarios.
I'd really like you to try and define this term in a way that doesn't exclude the US
I'm not sure what you are getting at, but judicial independence is one thing that the USA has (in some quantity) that China has none of. There is no such thing as judicial review in China, if the official class decides to ignore China's constitutional freedoms of speech, religion, and press, then there is no recourse for a court to come in and say, "no, that's not right." Vs. the USA, where the Supreme court comes in all the time and tells presidents and congress what they can't do.
The Chinese government has said multiple times that it believes rule of law is a western imperialistic concept, so it isn't like this is even a goal for them.
If anyone wants to point to US FISA laws and use that to equate the US justice system with China's, I'm all ears...
It's pretty obvious that this is not a problem at all, the only problem right now it's fabricating a narrative where someone is bad "because" while everyone allied with us (the west) it's not "because not".
You seem to be worried that an unfair judicial system poses a threat to everyone connected to the internet, well I got some news for you: Uber received $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and they are planning now to invest $40 billion on AI. Why are US companies accepting money from a bloodthirsty dictatorship then? A dictatorship where the actual dictator, Bin Salman, among other things, detained three members of the royal family (his family) for unexplained reasons, ordered the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that, even more worrisome, had spies in Twitter and McKinsey that helped him track down dissidents and silence critics. McKinsey and Twitter are still actively working with the Saudis and nobody has nothing to say about it... Not surprisingly the Saudi Prince Alwaleed is the second largest investor in twitter ATM through the Kingdom Holding.
Maybe we should refocus our priorities on the issues at large, not just those issues that are beneficial to the US in their war for the global supremacy.
I agree with most of your point but.
They didn't build the Utah Data Center because of their extremely limited amount of data.
We all like to joke about our data going to the NSA because our data has been repeatedly been caught going to the NSA.
I love that people point to one of the smallest NSA data centers as if its going to prove some sort of point.
Regardless, this is exactly the kind of whataboutism that I am talking about. Every government collects all the data it can. The difference is that the NSA targets foreign governments and terror organizations. The Chinese government targets the same but also goes after their citizens, foreign citizens, foreign corporations, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_global_surveillance_discl...
Sorry, but you seem a little naive. I recommend reading up on the US domestic surveillance program that the government was caught red handed engaging in.
Yeah, it’s not a joke…
Reverse whataboutism is still whataboutism.
For example this predicate
Completely ignores the fact that US companies have been found lying and deceiving to circumvent the barriers posed by the law.
But not only US companies, remember the diesel gate?
This other predicate
It's completely false, while this one
It's pure intellectual dishonesty . Every sufficiently advanced intelligence agency has spies. With the USA agencies being the largest employers for spies on the entire Planet.
And yet the US government isn't worried about a US company leaking photos of sensitive information to the US government.
The same cannot be said of the Chinese government who may be happy to get extensive drone footage of everyday US infrastructure which can be used in a future war.
Meanwhile, China won't even let Google provide a valid map of the country... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Google_Maps_in_Chi...
But tell us all more about how we should be more concerned about a US company requiring an internet login.
This is always an interesting read for the rest of us neither in the US nor China.
On one hand I understand we'll need to move to more insular and protective policies and basically ban foreign technology in so many places, on the other hand I don't want a gov like Ethiopia to have the choice between having no technology or being spied to the bone by all of its tech providers. The EU would be the only place with a one in a million chance to pull it off, there sure must be another way ?
The US government is right to be worried about China. Individuals, especially but not exclusively those of us who aren't US citizens, might well have more to fear from the US.
I don't mean this as a political issue, but in your comment I see one of the reasons Trump appeals to people. He promotes a mindset of "stop handwringing and just fix the damn problem."
Here we know the following:
1) DJI devices have an always-on connection
2) Chinese government is unfriendly to US and exerts strong control over Chinese companies
3) China regularly blocks US companies for whatever reason they decide.
So yeah, we can say "but banning DJI won't solve the general problem of bad companies; we shouldn't just focus on China; is a ban really fair? etc etc. Or, we can just say "screw it -- China treats US companies like shit and we're not gonna just hand over all our drone info"
I'm not sure how that would actually "fix the damn problem"? My point is that American tech companies are just as data-hungry as DJI, probably more, and Chinese tech products are more likely to let users control their devices off-line than American brands. You're right though that creating a boogeyman and attacking it while ignoring the much larger and more complicated problems is great politics (and always has been)
See, that's exactly what I mean.
Here [1], CISA assesses China-made drones as a national security risk. That is a non-partisan agency. But your response is:
* American tech companies are just as data-hungry, if not more. -> irrelevant, this is about foreign cyberattacks or foreign data mining
* China produces more user-controllable devices than American brands. -> irrelevant
* Boogeyman -> Scare word
* Ignoring the much larger and complicated problem -> Deflects and says we can't do /anything/ unless we consider all angles and do /everthing/
This leads to endless handwringing, and is one of the reasons the left has support of only 50% of Americans, when it should be (in my opinion) a huge majority. Because we're endlessly caught up in the attitude of "nope, we really can't do anything in the face of obviously problematic issues." Gosh, it feels racist to ban a Chinese tech company (even though the Chinese government does actually target our cyber infrastructure). Gosh, what about the bad American companies?
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24362988/cybersecurit...
Depends on what you consider the "problem". As Congress sees it, the problem is two-fold... You have no control over your data. The company that does have control over your data is beholden to a foreign country not currently considered "a close ally".
True.
I was just talking about my experience with DJI. Where you buy a product, can use it for a bit, and then it stops working, because you haven't connected it to the internet or created an account.
It is often the 'market leaders' that are so afraid to loose customers and their market position to implement customer hostile processes into their products.
Unfortunately this is required by regulators in many countries. In Thailand you can't fly a drone without a license. You need to obtain the license before activating the drone and provide your information and the license number at time of activation (which is tied to drone serial number).
It sucks but it's the law here.
shitty laws in thailand are no excuse for human rights infringements in the other 99% of the world
Requiring an account to use a DJI drone is a human rights violation?
yes, extorting your personal data including things like high-resolution geolocation of where you are, that's a human rights violation. it strips you of your right to privacy. it's also a national security threat, and it's still a national security threat even if the company that's extorting it is domestic
dji having access to cameras also strips anyone the drone can see of their human right to privacy
I would like to see a requirement that any drone sold in (or imported to) the US (or EU) has to be flashable - without having to desolder components, or any other such nonsense. Press some buttons and load new software.
An accompanying requirement would be to document interfaces to hardware subsystems (chip spec sheets would suffice).
With drones, the potential for mischief is too great to let malware be smuggled in.
Is this a politically and technically realistic goal ? Or am I talkin' thru my hat ?
Impossible, especially for drones, because it would allow people to trivially flash firmware to drones which can bypass restrictions like no-fly zones and reporting requirements which allow the FAA or other LE to answer questions like "who was flying a drone playing chicken with a low-flying Cessna"
Err, while it takes a little more technical know-how and some electronics experience, this already exists and is still extremely easy to do..
https://betaflight.com/
or
https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav
or
https://ardupilot.org/
among others
I hope they don't start asking questions about where the px4s are made!
i agree, but we shouldn't require all firmware to be open-source and user-replaceable on only chinese devices; we should require it for everything, perhaps with narrow exceptions for things like pos terminals and certain kinds of industrial equipment
Back before the war it was possible to obtain hacked DJI ROMs from the Russians that disabled all of these connections and restrictions including no-fly zones.
It's definitely economic protectionism but it's mostly protectionism for national security reasons. I assume the US is going to start manufacturing drones for war in large numbers in the near term and they need to be made at home (or at least by allies).
Those drones will be built for war, how are they competing with DJI who refuses to let their drones be used for war?
Except you can totally use a DJI drone for war. I saw a video the other day of such a drone modified to drop airsoft grenades. Does not take much to replace it with the real thing.
Might as well just shut down and ban all RC hobby shops because RC Airplanes can carry heavier payloads than all of DJI's consumer/prosumer lines -- and are much easier to modify.
Ease of piloting is a huge differentiating factor and the entire reason why public drone regulation didn't exist until every tom, dick, and harry could reasonably keep something in the air long enough to bother someone else, despite hobby RC airplanes being around decades before drones.
Non-FPV drone flyers can drop 40mm grenades from 100ft and hit a CEP of like a couple feet, and that's with literally four drops of practice and unsophisticated munitions. Untrained RC plane pilots can NOT do that.
It's not hard to find videos of DJI drones dropping real grenades onto Russians, sometimes straight into the open hatch of a Russian tank. It's harder than it looks on video, but when it works the end result is quite irreversible for the Russians.
HAHA. DJI drones are amongst the most popular tools of war in the Ukraine conflict. Sometimes they drop bombs directly, but more commonly they're used as long-ranged lookout stations and RF-repeater "hovering motherships" for bomb-equipped one-way FPV drone operators (as well as just general reconnaissance tasks).
That said, I don't think this law has anything to do with war, just simple economic protectionism driven by Skydio and other US drone lobbyists. Getting rid of DJI's excellent $7,000 enterprise drones lets Skydio sell their $15,000 + cloud-subscription enterprise drones instead.
https://www.skydio.com/solutions/defense
Sure, but DJI drones already weren't eligible for procurement in US defense anyway, so there's not a major net change there (barring weird edge case loopholes with third-party modifications). Skydio already got their protectionism in the federal space, this is a step beyond.
As others point out, DJI can't control what buyers do (a good default).
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say DJI won't manufacture drones for offensive war use. This sharply limits their usefulness to the US Military.
Either way, using US Mil as an excuse doesn't make sense for a ban. They won't be buying gear they have reason to mistrust.
As ever, reasons for the ban seem to be evidence-free speculation. Articles that omit this key part of the story aren't serving their readers.
Yeah the thing is that the US always, always justified everything by using the "national security" excuse/narrative. When another country does it to the US and its corporations, which has by far the longest modern history of getting involved in other nations national security, then it suddenly becomes an attack on free trade and pure protectionism.
Is it any different than China wanting data access from U.S companies that attempted to open their business there? I'm not in favor of this ban. I think they should've at least forced DJI to keep the data local before going for an outright ban.
I completely agree but the difference is that we already know China is a totalitarian one party dictatorship. They don't necessarily try to hide it to. That's not the case in the US, but it always sneaks in through dogwhistles like "national security". I mean who wants to be against that, right?
But yes it's obviously better for the US to at least keep the data from going overseas. But that's not really what we've been seeing with this potential ban and tik Tok. It's just outright banning stuff under the same "national security" boogeyman. Again, yes China does the exact same thing but I don't think we want to imitate China out of all nations. The cold war wasn't won by imitating the Soviet Union.
This seems likely. For those that haven't been following the war in Ukraine, now that all the Cold War munitions have been mostly used up, drones are now the primary weapon of both sides due to literal "bang per buck". It seems clear that drones are the 21st century weapon of choice.
Only for targeted attacks. The Russian way of prosecuting war is still a shower of shells, rockets, and a mob with guns. Drones are retail, Russians do wholesale.
I don't understand your argument: what has DJI - a manufacturer of personal use drones - with the US military wanting to build weaponized drones in the US?
The same reason the US props up any other militarily relevant tech, whether or not always used for that purpose. Protectionism of local industry.
See: chipmakers, telecom tech, aerospace tech, etc.
If this were the case I'd expect it to be related to all drones from China though. It also doesn't seem needed given the contracts can just state the requirement without extra hoopla.
Speaking as a Canadian, U.S. trade protectionism is nothing new. It happens all the time and frequently targets allies like Canada rather than rivals like China. What U.S. citizens should watch out for is when U.S. protectionism winds up hurting the U.S.'s own economy. e.g. Tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber may have helped out a few U.S. softwood lumber producers with good lobbyists (and Jimmy Carter), but the increase in lumber prices had a much larger negative impact on the U.S. economy as a whole due to higher costs of building materials impacting pretty much everyone.
That's a large part of the issue, though. The narrative 10 years ago was that we were preventing Chinese from dumping low-cost crap on the U.S. market. Okay, fair enough, keep the crap out. But recent U.S. protectionism has been targeting very high-quality, best-in-class Chinese manufacturers that honestly outcompete anything their U.S. competitors bring to market. Without that competition, there's no incentive for U.S. makers to raise their technological game, and the sector just stagnates and falls behind the rest of the world.
North America has the benefit of two oceans for national defense, but the risk associated with that is one of insularity and stagnation. Ask an indigenous person (if you can find one) how well being a couple hundred years behind European technological development worked out once hostile colonists are on your shores.
I don't think they were just
They were, 16th century muskets aren't much better than bows and arrows.
They were at least 2000 years behind Europe in weapons and armor technology. Some cultures had bronze weapons, but no iron smelting or steel.
Even before muskets started becoming common, European professional infantry had largely abandoned shields. Mass produced plate armor provided sufficient protection from arrows, and two-handed pikes were better than a pike and a shield.
On the other hand, bows became more effective again as muskets improved. When a musket could penetrate any reasonable armor, personal protection became less important.
Indeed, and we never seem to learn. Lumber prices in the US during Covid were eye-watering and wreaked havoc through the whole economy that is still being felt today, and it was almost entirely due to US protectionism of lumber.
Yes, Trump's tariffs were exceptionally bad, stupid, poorly thought out, and poorly implemented, like the vast majority of the things he did.
But the fact that goofus fails at doing X doesn't make doing X always the wrong choice.
I'm not a fan of protectionism either, but that particular example is not true at all.
Lumber prices rose because at the start of the pandemic, the industry predicted a housing crash and took drastic steps to downsize and then the exact opposite happened. And we were left with a garden-variety supply vs demand situation.
If it was just protectionism, prices in Canada would not have had sharply increased lumber prices at the exact same time: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lumber-prices-covid-19-cost...
Protectionism, like industry subsidies, is a double-edged sword.
- On the one hand, as SE Asia is intimately familiar with, it can create space to create globally competitive industries.
- On the other hand, it can also remove the incentive for local industries to invest and become technically competitive.
IMHO, what I'd like to see would be a stricter link between protection measures and R&D investment.
If an industry is protected, then it is required to prove it's improving itself + limit returns to shareholders.
E.g. steadily increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards, requirements to demonstrate decreasing costs of production (lumber and/or steel), etc.
Too often, protection measures are implemented, the excess benefits are skimmed and go directly to shareholders, and the company doesn't increase its global competitiveness (e.g. US Steel).
A la "chicken tax" (A 25% tariff on light trucks)
The US is the most protected "free trade" economy in the world, by far.
Why is this happening to China?
1.) China is supporting Russia militarily and financially on its invasion of Ukraine and attack on Europe
2.) China is lead by a dictator that has threatened time and time again to unify with Taiwan militarily if needed. And has boosted military presence threats on Taiwan, case in point, recent missile "drills". Taiwan right now is the most important technology driver of all things AI related
3.) China is attacking US in many sectors via state sponsorship of an industry to undercut and destroy an entire foreign sector companies, and IP theft. Happened before with solar.
none of this insight will help america compete with china. at first blush it seems like instead we're cutting ourselves off at the ankle.
So... what WILL help america compete with China? (without playing the same game) How could the US build out a competitive drone industry with chinese manufacturers able to cut price because the Chinese government will cover the gap?
Drones are not yet an "essential" piece of technology for the country as a whole. We're currently at "cutting ourselves off at the toe" territory... in a few years we'd be even more dependent and legislation like this would be catastrophic. Better now than in the 2026.
Surely the feds pumped a bunch of cash into electric vehicle domestic production, alongside a tariff on imports. We could start supporting domestic production of drones? There's obviously a market.
Presumably this is the actual answer—they're just better at manufacturing than we are at this point. By a large margin, as well. There is no shortcut to reversing decades and decades of shipping entire supply chains overseas at greatly reduced cost. We're just going to get substandard products at a greater cost to both the taxpayer (subsidy option) and the consumer (market option).
You swallow your losses until you automate your way out of a labor disadvantage or give up. Frankly the only reason this is getting attention is because it's seen as a military asset. It's basically burning cash to make the pentagon feel better about itself and generate a few hundred jobs at great cost to the taxpayer and pretending this is making some effort towards something valuable.
All Xi has to do is stop barreling towards an invasion of Taiwan.
The U.S., Europe, and Japan need to create and enhance a drone industrial base before China invades Taiwan. By the time it has invaded, creating the industrial base will be too late.
Also, China has created DJI through government-sponsored industrial policy, not via open markets.
So like Boeing, Intel, Lockheed-Martin, GE, IBM, etc..
That's nothing new, just 50-100 years behind the west...
As you well know the scale and effort to dominate external consumer markets is nothing similar.
Are you saying these US industries and companies have not dominated external markets?
the roots of silicon valley are in the decades of military contracts, initially, i.e. in the "government-sponsored industrial policy" https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=3546
Okay, but what will happen if US goes to war with China?
This can happen much quicker and easier than you think. Some Chinese delusional leader is going to attack Taiwan and voila, all the import from China will immediately stop at that exact moment.
Actual armed conflict? Total annihilation. Neither side wants this. Its why China will not invade Taiwan, and why the US won't put its boot on the neck of the China.
Okay, in a few years China senselessly invades Taiwan just because. Not a real scenario?
Is it? I suspect China has zero regrets in embracing protectionism for social media. The American drone consumer will get squeezed for a few years, until the US develops decent home-grown suppliers in a strategic industry. Hard to think of a better limited use of protectionism tbh.
Exactly! The Chinese leadership is smarter than America’s leadership: just look at what they do. They embrace protectionism when it makes sense.
I’ve just been considering getting into drone photography. Do you have any opinions or resources to share?
Other than waiting to see where things shake out with the Senate, perhaps Sony? I can't speak to manufacturer support, and not sure Sony will stay in the drone game in the long term where it would feel like a sound investment.
I've been looking at other commercial-esque options (mainly photogrammetry) and came across Sony's"bring your own DSLR" drone.
https://pro.sony/ue_US/products/professional-drones/ars-s1
How can it be protectionism when the US has no consumer drone industry to protect?
I disagree with the EU on a lot of things, but when it comes to tech and privacy in particular, they're the gold standard in putting individual people first. As someone deeply involved in my company's compliance with GDPR, it can't be overstated how important it is.
Repeat of Harley Davidson situation?
The US is embracing protectionism because we lost the manufacturing advantage. We lost the advantage because we outsourced our manufacturing to China with the pipe dream that we could keep the "higher end" of the value chain. It's as if we can magically have senior engineers without training junior ones in factories. It's as if the equally ambitious and talented Chinese fellows wouldn't want to climb up the value chain. As a result, we have lost talent. We have lost know-how. We have lost the supply chain. We have lost the intuition of how to optimize or scale manufacturing.
What a shame.
Yep. That's basically what's happening. It's China success envy syndrome. And instead of competing in healthy ways, political concerns roll out crushing policies that harm both investing opportunities and the ability of consumers to choose freely.
Worth noting that this is a different kind of protectionism than that sometimes practiced by developing nations to build up their local infrastructure and industry. In both cases you end up with higher domestic prices and lower quality of goods (at least at first) but at least in the case of the developing nation you do actually build up some domestic infrastructure and industry in the meantime. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to do so.)
That's not what's happening here as there is no build-up for us to do. This is just the US government acting on behalf of US companies to shield them from competition so they can soak the domestic market for every cent without interference. There's no way any of this is going to reverse or even slow down the trend of enshittification - in fact, it's going to accelerate it.
The risk of relying on China for anything military related is too high. They have an aggressive, expansionary mindset and threaten war over Taiwan all the time.
You use protectionism like it's a bad thing, but I'm sure the folks in the military industrial complex see what's going on in Ukraine and realise it wouldn't be a bad thing if the US had some domestic small drone manufacturing capabilities. Banning DJI could both encourage some of that manufacturing, while also stemming the flow of data to China.
We used to spend ludicrous amounts of money to fly spy planes to map hostile countries - now a hostile country has a access to a huge number of drones providing live camera data. These drones are hard to track so the government doesn't always know if they've been flown near sensitive areas. It would be negligent of the government to not try to do something about it.