Image: Alice Noir / Aart van Bezooijen / The White House / Protocol
The havoc of Trump’s ‘Clean Network’

Good morning! This Thursday, the Trump administration makes its demands on the internet, Samsung and Microsoft are strange bedfellows, and a Tesla engineer reinvents the chocolate chip.
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Someday this section will not be about TikTok, I promise. But today is not that day, because as the rhetoric continues to get louder and wilder, alarm bells should be going off inside every American software company. On Wednesday, Mike Pompeo spent part of a press briefing detailing "the expansion of the Clean Network." What is that? Five things, Pompeo said:
"We don't want companies to be complicit in Huawei's human rights abuses, or the CCP's surveillance apparatus," Pompeo said. He called on "all freedom-loving nations and companies" to join the Clean Network program.
All the usual caveats apply here: The Trump administration is remarkably good at saying things without doing anything, there's no indication of how any of this would happen or if it's even legally possible, there are plenty of other things to worry about right now, and the most likely outcome is that nothing changes at all.
But the Clean Apps idea is a big one, with serious ramifications. Huawei is the largest smartphone manufacturer on the planet, and cutting out all Chinese manufacturers — like Oppo and Vivo — would shake up the entire smartphone ecosystem. It would also effectively lock American software companies out of countries like India, where Chinese companies own most of the smartphone market.
If you make phone software or run app stores — I'm looking at you, Sundar and Tim — you may soon be under a lot of pressure to pull back access on both. If you make an app that's used around the world (also known as "basically everyone in tech"), the idea of your app suddenly not being allowed on Chinese-made devices is an existentially scary one. And, right now, a surprisingly real one.
In related news:Instagram launched Reels, its feature that lets users … do TikTok. Instagram made TikTok.
We haven't done this enough, but we're going to start doing it more: I want to hear what you think! Watch this space, because we're going to do trivia, giveaways, all kinds of fun stuff. But for now …
I want to know what you think about TikTok. Are you using it personally? Would you let your employees, family, friends install the app? Why or why not? Send me your thoughts to david@protocol.com, and we'll feature a few good answers in Friday's newsletter.
Samsung launched a bunch of phones Wednesday, but to me the most interesting part of the deeply awkward, BTS-featuring digital event was how prominently Microsoft featured. There's Microsoft, making it easy for users to link their Android phone and Windows PC! There's OneNote, syncing handwritten notes, and Teams, syncing to-do lists! Want Xbox Game Pass for free? Buy a Note!
Microsoft-Samsung is an odd partnership, especially as Surface continues to do well and Microsoft prepares to get back into the mobile-hardware game. But what it really means is that these two companies are more afraid of Google than they are of each other.
Every company wanted to be Apple for a while, to make all the hardware and software and services. That's a spectacularly profitable plan when it works, with a lot of failures strewn along the way. But if companies can instead compete by working together — by making it easy to connect and use all your devices even when they're not all made by the same company — they can take on Apple in a much more real way.
It's like they say: If you can't beat 'em, join up with somebody else, and try again together. That's what they say, right?
Qualtrics' Work Different free virtual event, on August 12, will explore how successful organizations like Atlassian, Microsoft, the NBA, and many others are listening to and taking action on the feedback from their customers and employees to create a "new better" for their business. Register now at Qualtrics.com.
Mike Murphy writes: Right after Jim Farley was named CEO of Ford, he made it clear that he wants to run in tech circles. "We know our competition today," he said, and it's not the Nissan Juke. "It's Amazon, Baidu, Tesla, Apple and others."
Taking on tech sounds good, but this actually isn't a new tactic. The Previous Jim In Charge, Jim Hackett, spent years focusing on autonomy and a future where people don't own cars like they used to.
Farley's job for the short term, it seems, is to help carry out the $11 billion restructuring plan that Hackett launched in 2018. After that, he'll have to grapple with a COVID-ravaged world, and is going to hit a put-up-or-shut-up moment with Ford's transformation pretty quickly.
But grappling with the future isn't just a Ford problem: Until Farley or anyone else can prove they're actually building the tech they've been promising for years, it's still a car company. There are still dealerships to work with, gas-powered trucks and cars to build for today's consumers, and decades of tradition to overcome. Meanwhile, all those tech companies Farley named are learning how the auto industry works — and quickly.
All the bluster about Section 230 "requiring neutrality" is nonsense, Ron Wyden said:
A letter from 20 U.S. state attorneys general said Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg need to do more to fight disinformation:
On Protocol: Amazon admitted to selling Echo speakers below cost, which Sonos CEO Patrick Spence called "predatory pricing":
By day, Remy Labesque is an industrial designer at Tesla. But on nights and weekends, he's spent three years working with Dandelion Chocolate to build a better … chocolate chip. Turns out, the perfect chocolate chip looks like a smooth, polygonal space rock from a Marvel movie, and manages to both melt in your mouth and hold up to serious baking. Forget the future of transportation, these are the problems I'm glad our best minds are working on.
Qualtrics' Work Different free virtual event, on August 12, will explore how successful organizations like Atlassian, Microsoft, the NBA, and many others are listening to and taking action on the feedback from their customers and employees to create a "new better" for their business. Register now at Qualtrics.com.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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