Recently Florida Board of Governors announced emergency regulation 3.0075, prohibiting wechat and tiktok on all state university wi-fi networks. The universities immediately implemented this rule, blocking all wechat and tiktok traffic on their networks. This is causing tremendous hardship for foreign students with families in China, as wechat is the only way of communicating with their families.
I would like to seek opinions on two questions below:
1. Is there a legitimate technical justification for banning wechat on the university wi-fi network? Our IT guy is sure that a compromised mobile device would cause harm to the wi-fi infrastructure. But shouldn’t the network have security measures against such cases? Why would it be vulnerable to just “compromised devices” but not malicious devices?
2. Does such a ban violate eduroam policy? In the eduroam compliance statement, Appendix B.8 states
B.8. eduroam SP services are based on SP local policies. However, modifying the content of user connections (e.g., access lists or firewall filter rules to deny arbitrary ports or application-layer proxies) is strongly discouraged and MUST be reported to the respective RO.
Does banning wechat on an eduroam network fall under this rule? Who is the Roaming Operator (RO) that oversees Florida universities? How should this be reported?
Thanks for all your help!