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President Trump's haphazard war on Chinese tech has left the Biden administration with a raft of unfinished business involving efforts to restrict Chinese firms and products in U.S. markets.

Why it matters: The Chinese and American tech industries are joined at the hip in many ways, and that interdependence has shaped decades of prosperity. But now security concerns and economic rivalries are wrenching them apart.

Here's where things stand between the U.S. and several key Chinese tech powerhouses:

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the Defense Department added Chinese phone maker Xiaomi to its a list of companies with ties to the Chinese military, potentially requiring US investors to sell their stake in the company. Xiaomi denies it is owned or controlled by the military.

Why it matters: Xiaomi doesn’t sell phones in the U.S., but it does have a significant amount of investment from U.S. funds — and also has long-term ambitions of doing more U.S. business.

China’s largest chip foundry was added to the so-called entity list in late December, notably limiting the firm's access to key gear from the U.S., especially equipment used in the newest generation of semiconductors.

Why it matters: Much of the gear used to turn silicon wafers into chips is made by U.S. companies like Applied Materials. However, the U.S. move against SMIC also hurts global chipmaking capacity during a time of significant shortage.

The Chinese telecom giant remains the tech company most in U.S. crosshairs, facing actions and restrictions from a range of government entities, including the Justice Department, Commerce Department and FCC.

Huawei is challenging many of these actions in court, including in a recent suit aimed at reversing FCC-imposed restrictions.

Why it matters: Huawei is one of a handful of companies around the world that make the gear needed for 5G and other cellular networks.

The company has been particularly successful in developing countries, partly because its equipment often sells for far less than that from rivals such as Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung.

Huawei has also been a global leader in smartphones, though its ability to compete outside China has been severely curtailed by its lack of access to Google's Android services and other U.S.-developed technology.

Trump's effort to force a sale of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app by imposing a U.S. ban was his noisiest campaign against a Chinese company. But several key components of the effort ran aground in court, and a deadline for a sale came and went with TikTok still in limbo. 

Officials earlier this month said the Biden administration had paused talks initiated under Trump to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to an investor group that included Oracle and Walmart.

Why it matters: Some lawmakers have suggested Beijing could force TikTok to hand over Americans' data or otherwise somehow exploit the app for spying or hacking purposes.

The Trump administration didn't turn up any evidence of wrongdoing in making the case that TikTok should be banned, but suggested the risk alone justified its moves.

When Trump issued his order against TikTok, he paired it with a ban on WeChat, the chat app used globally by Chinese speakers. But that bid, too, got derailed in court. 

In his final weeks in office, Trump then sought to ban WeChat Pay from the U.S., together with a number of other Chinese-owned payment platforms.

Why it matters: WeChat is widely used not only by people in China but among the global Chinese diaspora. Banning it could cut off a critical communications link between people around the world and their relatives and friends in China.

Between the lines: China is running into growing pains of its own in the push to own the future of technology.

SMIC, for instance, was struggling to deliver on ambitious expansion and production goals even before facing the Trump administration's restrictions.

Several leading Chinese tech executives have run afoul of Beijing.

The Chinese government has also embarked on an antitrust crackdown that could clip several domestic tech giants' wings.

The bottom line: The Biden administration now has to sort out which Trump initiatives to drop — because they were botched, thrown out in court or self-defeating — and which can still serve the U.S.'s long-term goals of competing with China and limiting Chinese security threats. 

Trump's assault on Chinese tech left loose ends galore

Haphazard efforts to shut Chinese tech giants out of the U.S. leave the Biden administration with choices.

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Technology

China

Business

TikTok

President Trump&#x27;s haphazard war on Chinese tech has left the Biden administration with a raft of unfinished business involving efforts to restrict Chinese firms and products in U.S. markets.Why it matters: The Chinese and American tech industries are joined at the hip in many ways, and that interdependence has shaped decades of prosperity. But now security concerns and economic rivalries are wrenching them apart.

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Internet users in the Washington-to-Boston corridor reported widespread outages Tuesday, affecting service for both broadband and internet content.

Driving the news: Many Americans have been unable to access remote learning and telework because of the outages, which have affected ISPs including Verizon FiOS, Charter and Comcast as well as internet services including Google, YouTube, Amazon's AWS and Zoom.

What's happening: The widespread issues are unrelated to a FiOS fiber internet cable getting cut in Brooklyn, contrary to reports circulating widely on social media linking the two, a Verizon spokesperson said.

What they're saying: "We have seen reports of internet-related outages on the East Coast, making it difficult for people to work  remotely and go to school online," tweeted acting FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel. "The @FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is working to get to the bottom of what is going on."

"There is a problem nationally affecting Internet access and access to many tools including Zoom, Google and Canvas. Students may experience delays accessing their classes," tweeted Maryland's Montgomery County School District in the D.C. suburbs, linking to a portal for checking service status.

Editor's note: This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Part of East Coast hit by internet outages

Internet users in the Washington-to-Boston corridor reported widespread outages Tuesday affecting service for both broadband and internet content.

Illustration of scissors cutting cords connected to various computers

Internet access

Internet users in the Washington-to-Boston corridor reported widespread outages Tuesday, affecting service for both broadband and internet content.Driving the news: Many Americans have been unable to access remote learning and telework because of the outages, which have affected ISPs including Verizon FiOS, Charter and Comcast as well as internet services including Google, YouTube, Amazon&#x27;s AWS and Zoom.

It will take an all-out national effort to dismantle the radicalization pipeline that has planted conspiracy theories in the heads of millions of Americans and inspired last month's attack on the Capitol, experts tell Axios.

Two key measures that could make a difference:

Keeping extremists out of the institutions where they could do the greatest damage — like the military, police departments and legislatures.

Providing help for those who have embraced dangerous ideologies.

Online platforms, meanwhile, must be unwavering in their commitment to root out conspiracy theories and lies that undermine faith in democracy, according to experts interviewed by Axios.

Radicalization and counterterrorism experts broadly applaud tech companies' efforts, now underway, to remove this material and the accounts that spread it off their platforms, despite heavy blowback from conservatives. 

Twitter's decision to ban Donald Trump is seen on its own as a major asset in the fight to slow or reverse radicalization.

The U.S. needs a "Marshall Plan against domestic extremism," Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies, told Axios.

"The spread of extremist conspiracy theories in the United States is the second most dangerous pandemic the country faces right now," he said. "The damage that's been to the U.S. in terms of community and social cohesion will be immense and will be lasting."

The radicalization is happening in a multitude of online spaces and right-wing media channels, pulling people into an alternate reality that posits, among a growing swarm of other false ideas, that the 2020 election was stolen.

When it comes to coordinated deradicalization efforts, the U.S. is behind most European countries by 25–30 years, Koehler said.

The latest: Twitter's ongoing purge of far-right conspiracy theorists who have spread the lie that Trump won the 2020 election continued apace over the weekend, as the company suspended the account of Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft.

Facebook, meanwhile, plans to deprioritize all political content on its platform and is reportedly mulling a broader rethink of how Facebook groups work as it becomes clearer they served as a channel for organizing and executing the Capitol riot.

The efforts, however, will have to go well beyond the tech platforms.

A key part of breaking extremists' rising mainstream influence will be making it unacceptable for white nationalists, anti-government extremists and conspiracy theorists to serve in the military, in police forces or as lawmakers.

Experts worry that the GOP's tacit and sometimes explicit approval of extremists will hamper efforts to keep police forces and legislatures free of conspiracy theorists.

"At DOD, it will go well and they will quash it," said former FBI counterterrorism analyst Clint Watts. "It's a lot of sheriffs' departments that make me nervous, because they're elected. Politics means you go with party."

Yes, but: A purely punitive, security-minded approach alone is likely to prove ineffective and invasive at best, experts say. At worst, it will only fuel extremists' sense of persecution and push them closer to violence.

Instead, experts agree serious resources need to be mustered toward providing an offramp for people who have been drawn into extremist ideologies.

New federal programs would likely be doomed to fail, experts say, because distrust and hatred of the government is already a core tenet of far-right extremism.

Instead, private and public-private programs are more likely to be effective, particularly if they're able to get endorsement and funding from federal and state governments.

Those could include anti-extremism counseling programs and support groups; education programs that work with schools to identify risks and signs of incipient radicalization; and rehabilitation organizations that work with the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated.

One idea, courtesy of Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi leader who founded the Free Radicals Project, which works to help people leave violent extremist groups: a "single entry point" akin to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline "that people recognize, that people trust, that people understand."

Something like a national hotline or online portal could steer people to local resources to help them or loved ones escape the radicalization pipeline, he said.

The bottom line: "Any sort of solution is going to have to be holistic and is going to have to have empathy at its core," said Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow with the Atlantic Council.

How to deprogram America's extremists

What a "Marshall Plan against domestic extremism" might look like.

Far-right politics

Politics

Misinformation

Elon Musk

It will take an all-out national effort to dismantle the radicalization pipeline that has planted conspiracy theories in the heads of millions of Americans and inspired last month&#x27;s attack on the Capitol, experts tell Axios.Two key measures that could make a difference:<ul><li>Keeping extremists out of the institutions where they could do the greatest damage — like the military, police departments and legislatures.</li><li>Providing help for those who have embraced dangerous ideologies.</li></ul>

President Biden has made the COVID-19 crisis and a post-Trump return to national unity and traditional democratic ideals his top priorities. From vaccinations to stimulus to schools, Biden is seeking bipartisan compromise while showing a willingness to use executive authority and bare Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to implement his policies. Republican leaders are navigating deep party divisions over if and how to move beyond former President Trump.

Politics & Policy

Retail investors’ battle against short sellers who had bet against GameStop and AMC — and other heavily shorted stocks with depressed share prices — offers a window into what happens when Reddit culture spills out into the real world.

The big picture: Reddit is a microcosm of mainstream internet culture, a massive clearinghouse for all sorts of interests that's populated mostly by young men with a vaguely anti-establishment bent. That's caused major trouble at times, but is now propelling a populist-progressive unity movement that's rattling Wall Street.

Catch up quick: The run on troubled stocks with vintage appeal — first GameStop, then other 2000s mall staples like AMC, Nokia and BlackBerry — began with one man.

Roaring Kitty, as he's known on YouTube and Twitter, has been talking up GameStop stock since taking a long position in it a year ago, when he noticed it was among the most heavily shorted stocks on the market.

On Reddit, where he posts as u/DeepFuckingValue, he's spent months posting about it to the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, a forum of several million amateur investors and spectators who mostly ridiculed his bullish-on-GameStop posts until recently.

The roughly $754,000 he ultimately put into GameStop is now worth tens of millions of dollars.

The WallStreetBets community has remained at the center of everything that's happened since.

The most devoted investors hang out on the Reddit WSB homebase and Discord, where the main WSB server was shut down for allowing hate speech after getting spammed with racial slurs. (It has since resurfaced.)

On major platforms like Twitter and YouTube, the WSB ethos — in this case, a half-joking commitment to holding strong on GameStop and the other stocks to try to force them ever higher — has proven attractive. It has drawn in newbies as well as entire communities, like the staff and fandom at Barstool Sports.

Robinhood and other trading platforms have only burnished the anti-elite pull of the movement by throwing up roadblocks to freeze transactions involving the hot stocks.

The appeal is obvious. The WSB types have demonstrated that, by banding together, normies can flip the script on billionaires who were just waiting to cash in on failure and collapse.

That it's being done with stocks that are in inexorable sectoral decline is part of the fun. A massively inflated market cap won't save GameStop from the fact that most video game sales are now digital, or AMC from the theater business being on life support, or Nokia from having lost the smartphone wars years ago.

Keeping their prices up is instead a show of solidarity, a way to make the vultures tremble and, of course, a way to get rich, at least on paper, and at least until the party ends.

Money isn't real, the thinking goes. Wall Street has always known that, and now regular people are seeing it too.

Between the lines: Some commentators have described the investors as trolls; some have drawn a through-line between them and the Capitol rioters.

It's true that both groups viewed themselves as the good guys injecting anti-establishment online chatter into the real world and charging the gates to strike fear into the hearts of the elites.

But the insurrectionists were there to overturn an election and possibly kill lawmakers. The WSB types are operating within the law, turning the system against the people they view as abusing it.

What's next: At some point, the inflated prices, wildly decoupled from any underlying fundamentals, are bound to come crashing down.

But the excitement at having pulled this off at all could prove sustaining, driving the millions of Redditors and other retail investors into new schemes.

Or, if Wall Street, Silicon Valley or Washington take steps to keep it from happening again, the excitement could curdle into rage.

How Reddit explains the GameStop saga

What happens when Reddit culture spills out into the real world.

Illustration of a glowing computer in the dark with the Reddit Alien on screen looking menacing.  

Reddit

Retail investors’ battle against short sellers who had bet against GameStop and AMC — and other heavily shorted stocks with depressed share prices — offers a window into what happens when Reddit culture spills out into the real world.The big picture: Reddit is a microcosm of mainstream internet culture, a massive clearinghouse for all sorts of interests that&#x27;s populated <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="mostly by young men" data-vars-click-url="https://www.journalism.org/2016/02/25/reddit-news-users-more-likely-to-be-male-young-and-digital-in-their-news-preferences/" data-vars-content-id="abf742f7-3716-47ef-9332-c8c3cf9ecfe4" data-vars-headline="How Reddit explains the GameStop saga" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.journalism.org/2016/02/25/reddit-news-users-more-likely-to-be-male-young-and-digital-in-their-news-preferences/" target="_blank">mostly by young men</a> with a vaguely anti-establishment bent. That&#x27;s caused <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="major trouble" data-vars-click-url="https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/8/6121363/reddit-is-a-failed-state" data-vars-content-id="abf742f7-3716-47ef-9332-c8c3cf9ecfe4" data-vars-headline="How Reddit explains the GameStop saga" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/8/6121363/reddit-is-a-failed-state" target="_blank">major trouble</a> at times, but is now propelling a populist-progressive unity movement that&#x27;s rattling Wall Street.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump who thought he was about to stop the inauguration, seize power and crush his enemies were left blinking in the sunlight Wednesday as President Biden took the oath of office.

Why it matters: It's an inflection point for anyone who realizes they've been strung along by QAnon and related strands of pro-Trump magical thinking. They could either retreat from conspiracy theories or tumble deeper down the rabbit hole.

Driving the news: Pro-Trump Telegram channels and other online forums were filled Wednesday with posts from users angry and disappointed that Trump did not black out U.S. communications networks and send in the military to arrest Biden and other Democrats and celebrities.

"The military, law enforcement, fbi, cia, and doj all betrayed their oath to the constitution and the american people," read one top-ranked post on a leading pro-Trump forum.

"Jesus was dead for three days before he was resurrected. Never lose hope," read another on a separate forum for QAnon believers.

Between the lines: Those two currents — frustration vs. lingering hope that there's still a grand plan to be revealed — dominated far-right online spaces Wednesday.

Once Trump lost re-election, it was inevitable that it would come to this. QAnon-style thinking, in which a secret plan to secure total victory over the left is just around the corner, has grown increasingly central to many Trump supporters' worldview, as GOP Sen. Ben Sasse warned in The Atlantic last week.

Biden's inauguration marked a hard stop of a sort that QAnon believers haven't had to confront since the conspiracy theory began in 2017.

The big picture: QAnon prophecies have failed before — all of them, in fact.

But that hasn't stopped QAnon, which began as a close cousin of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, from spinning out into a sort of grand unifying conspiracy theory.

Along the way, it has absorbed countless far-right, science-skeptical and simply contrarian views involving topics ranging from child trafficking to 5G to vaccines to medical masks.

The question now is what happens to that broad coalition, now left angry and aimless.

What's next: "If #QAnon begins to splinter soon, we'll need to pay attention to the emergence of potentially violent offshoots," tweeted Colin Clarke, director of policy and research at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm.

"We know some adherents possess the propensity for extreme violence, those who feel duped could grow exceedingly desperate & seek to lash out. Humiliation fuels rage."

QAnon faces the music

Believers could either retreat from conspiracy theories or become easy picking for extremists trawling the far-right web for radicalization targets.

QAnon

Supporters of former President Donald Trump who thought he was about to stop the inauguration, seize power and crush his enemies were left blinking in the sunlight Wednesday as President Biden took the oath of office.Why it matters: It&#x27;s an inflection point for anyone who realizes they&#x27;ve been strung along by QAnon and related strands of pro-Trump magical thinking. They could either retreat from conspiracy theories or tumble deeper down the rabbit hole.

Kyle Daly

Stories

Trump's assault on Chinese tech left loose ends galore

How to deprogram America's extremists

How Reddit explains the GameStop saga

Part of East Coast hit by internet outages

QAnon faces the music