People would say "China can decide what they want to allow".
Well if China can decide (which they did first) two can play this game.
Also TikTok says this ban is baseless. If USA's ban of TikTok is baseless, what base does China have for banning everything?
If TikTok wins, it means that we didn't follow our own laws. Either change the laws or follow the current ones.
You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state. You get it by valuing individual rights and freedom.
I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it
> I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it
Everything you said here we already know. What you don't realize is the world is going through an invisible war right now at a scale of world war 3. These first world country people have never lived a difficult life so they just think everything will be all right just because it's been all right through their entire life. When China gains its dominance by bullying the rest of the world and the rest of the world just trying to "take the high road", they will realize there's no longer anything they can do about the situation because the Chinese economy has become too strong. This is why countries like India are taking the same route already (They were the ones who banned TikTok first).
There is no permanent "ally" in the world politics. If you naively think "taking the high road" will win you allies even if it means losing your power, you should study history and learn to see long term.
How can anyone paying attention to global politics for the past 20 years claim this?
>I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves
The short-term thinking was Western companies doing everything in their power to appease the CCP in order to gain access to a huge market.
The US already has that.
> You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state
Which is why immigrants prefer US to China, banning tic tok is not going to change that.
Uber lost in China mainly because of this.
Basically foreign owned companies don't have the same constitutional rights as ones owned by US citizens - these companies operations basically being foreign commerce is where the entity list powers are derived from.
Foreign ownership doesn't enjoy the same rights as LLCs registered in the US, ironically. For example, even though Huawei operated in the US through a US LLC, Trump still regulated its associations as defined by the foreign affairs power - as well as how corporations with US operations interacted with these foreign associated Huawei entities.
Otherwise corporate personhood would anull all trade deals in the US, and I think even the article you linked mentions their limited protections in the US.
The legal basis for the Order banning Tik Tok [1] came from Order 13873 [2]. It's...not the best.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/05/17/2019-10...
You can argue nation security when it comes to any app that isn't doing end-to-end, especially if it's written in a way that could allow the first, or a third party, to get access to arbitrary user data with the plausible deniability that security bugs can offer.
TikTok has had security bugs that made me outright mad when I looked at an expose on some of them. The kind of comedically terrible bugs they've had not too long ago makes it absolutely certain there are many, many more. Not even checking which user is logged in when you send a message for the user? Seriously, that's embarrassing in a rarely used feature on an app with a handful of users. Core functionality on a hundreds of millions users app? That's so terrible I almost can't believe it.
Not that other apps don't have bugs, but the track record, and global spread would make a solid argument. Confound by their app appearing to spread the data over an absolutely massive number of domains, and hosts, making auditing very hard, and also attribution of blame if data gets in the wrong hand.
I'm not saying eg Facebook is necessarily much different, only what argument can be made. Incidentally, what TikTok is doing is almost certainly illegal in EU, as I have no information that they have even attempted to follow GDPR rules.
This is fallacious.
China is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy under the rule of law. There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
International free market trade is founded on reciprocity - you open your markets and I open mine, under analogous regulatory conditions. Can US companies such as Facebook or Google operate with the same degree of freedom that TikTok does in the West?
Furthermore, and perhaps more relevantly to your question of whether TikTok has broken any US laws, it may be that it has. I have a very limited understanding of US politics and law but I do know that (a) there's a trainload of highly complex national security regulations, (b) Executive Orders provide the President a means to "steer" the application of the Law, and in this case it may be simply a way of enforcing codes that have been applied very loosely or not enforced until at all now.
I don't know if the EO will hold ground or not, but if it doesn't, I hope the US (and eventually the EU, where I am a citizen) find other ways to legally challenge the abhorrent asymmetry in playing conditions for software companies in China vs. the Democratic West.
Would you say it's kind of like the US President being able to just ban things he just says are threats to National Security? All of the authoritarian regimes have laws that specifically allow them to do what they do. They're usually authoritarian because they can and do call everything they don't like a threat to National Security.
Where is the actual proof here? Where can everyone take a look at it?
No such mechanisms exists in an authoritarian regime like the Chinese.
Read up about the countless cases in those countries. Enforcing national security laws are very, very often the reason for the most fucked up judgements. All those cases from North Korea? Yep, national security without verifiable proof of how it endangers national security.
From my original comment, which you replied to:
> There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Either you didn't read that part, chose to omit it, or you are being deliberately rude, questioning "what I'm on about".
The difference between those authoritarian regimes and a democracy under the Rule of Law like the US is the degree in which the law can be arbitrarily superseded by an authority, such as a Party or Ruler, breaking the separation of powers.
Comparing the legal systems and guarantees of China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, with those of the US is disingenuous at best.
You did not address the fundamental point which is that an Executive Order can be challenged in a Court of Law - it will be, in fact.
Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?
> Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?
Yes, absolutely. It happens all the time. Those rulers use _the laws afforded to them_ to rule. It's completely wrong to suggest that they just do whatever the hell they want. That's just not the case at all. Please look into the topic. Those countries have laws that make it very, very easy for the rulers to justify doing whatever they want.
MBS can put you in jail for live not because he's free to do whatever he wants but because the laws are designed in a way that gives him every reason to justify putting anyone in jail - as I mentioned, usually based on national security grounds.
Those very same national security reasons that authoritarian regimes constantly use are being used by Trump.
So yes, Trump being able to claim something a national security issue without having to provide proof, without giving the accused a chance to take a look at the evidence that supposedly exists against them, without them being able to defend themselves from the accusations, that's exactly what authoritarian regimes do.
I will however leave some data, from the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020 [1]. These indices measure how strong the Rule of Law is in each country:
Germany - 0.84
United Kingdom - 0.79
Japan - 0.78
US - 0.73
France - 0.73
South Korea - 0.73
---
China - 0.48
Russia - 0.47
Turkey - 0.43
There's no data for North Korea or Saudi Arabia, because they're so closed that there's not even a point in trying to judge the quality of their legal system. Go figure.
[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/publications/rule-l...
China has censorship laws that you might not like, but you can certainly still choose to comply if you want to be in that market. Indeed, many US companies have chosen to do so and participate in that market while others feel the cost is too high and do not.
What could TikTok do to comply here and be allowed in the US? It wasn't banned for non-compliance in some tit-for-tat measure, it was banned for simply being from China.
There are reasons you can oppose this ban, but this isn't a good one of those reasons.
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The US promises certain freedoms and protections, and TikTok is saying the US is unfairly denying them those freedoms and protections.
China doesn't promise those things to anyone, so there's no grounds to complain they're not being fair.
I mean, imagine this argument applied to other things. "They don't allow <insert liberty> in their home country, why are they suing the US for denying <insert liberty>?"
The more interesting question is my eyes is who's going to benefit/hurt from all this and why - US consumers, US/Chinese tech cos, US/Chinese foreign interests? I'd love to hear opinions on this aspect.
Like another comment said, it'll be interesting to see what comes out in discovery.
Where, the company with greater market access, has greater access to profit, and then greater chances of winning. We strip away all other pretenses, it might just boil down to, S(C(us)) < S(C(ch)), which is just a consequence of the rule set. No way forward, when S(C(us)) > S(C(ch)) is the goal, changing the rule set is the only available action.
You're trying to intentionally confuse to tangential concepts, and murdering common sense and logic to do so.
Amtrak is almost entirely owned by the US Government and has taken in 10s of billion of federal dollars to operate, yet you can go out and sue it like any other company despite the protections US Government entities normally have.
Because owning something, and being that thing, are not the same thing... in case you didn't realize. That's actually one of the core justifications of most corporations
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The Chinese government is not suing the US Government, TikTok is. Sure there's lots of fun power dynamics to dive into over who controls TikTok and so on, but if you can't get the simple fact of who's suing who, you should hush up on the topic.
I believe the national security risk argument is stronger in the case of Huawei. Since having a state run company build essential communication infrastructure is clearly a bad idea. However, I think it also applies to ByteDance. Why would you allow a foreign government uninhibited access to huge amounts of data about your citizens? Especially when that government is a hostile totalitarian regime currently engaged in serious human rights violations.
Who are you defining as “people”? I’ve only ever seen people criticize their bans on media.
Also just maybe, they don't want that facebooks clone (Reels) now takes their place?
Maybe they don't want to be sh*t all over just cuz they are based in China and do simply not care about the conflicts the countries have?
I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil. US is supposed to be better than that, remember?
I think the issue here is that it's a foreign owned business. I know tit-for-tat might be happening in the eyes of US law makers, but many of the constitutional protections we afford citizens are only extended as a convenience to non-citizens - a convenience usually rooted in positive trade relationships.
If you had a phone that let you install software on it of your choosing then you could install whatever you want, regardless of who Apple isn't allowed to do business with. They made themselves a chokepoint, so now they're a chokepoint.
The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around... no, your phone's only route is through the one corporation.
US restrictions on foreign trade are restrictions on Americans.
Err, foreign affairs (and thus commerce) has always been something regulated by the US government - something reserved for the president unless the legislative explicitly declares otherwise. Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
Do you know any constitutional clause or SCOTUS case suggesting otherwise?
Expand on these basic rights that are violated if TikTok is banned. And since when do foreign businesses have basic rights in US or any other democracy?
This situation should've been stopped a while ago, China banned every company they wanted while the others let them operate everywhere according to the free market rules.
Exports is what you pay for your imports. It's better for US citizens to be able to buy Chinese products even if Chinese citizens can't buy us products. They can pay for it by exporting to other countries from which China buys.
Your enemy brakes rules to gain advantage, why wouldn't you.
I for long thought of this as a weakness in America.
Thousands of children of CPC's top leadership live, and study in USA, including children of Xi, Li, and Lin.
Your solution to solve your problem with China overnight was pretty much lying under your nose.
Think, not a single government employee in China can legally afford to pay for their children tuition in Harvard (which people in China jokingly call "the new Central Party School.") The salary of a government employee in China is legally capped at around CNY 32000. There is no way in hell even Chinese government ministers can pay for their children lavish lifestyles in the West from legit income.
Probably because if your "enemy" (interesting that this wording started to pop up in relation to China a lot) is a totalitarian state which abuses their people... you don't want to follow their rules and societal structure.
At least that's my takeaway as an Eastern European with a bit of experience of such regimes.
China is a different jurisdiction with different legislation, different constitution and a different justice system. It's a completely different set of rules... If an American company sues China... the outcome will be decided on Chinese courts, based on Chinese legislation and Chinese constitutionality.
TikTok will fight the US in US courts, abiding to US legislation, US constitutionality, etc... In the end, it will be up to a judge or eventually the US Supreme Court to decide what happens.
If the "game" is censorship and social control of citizens, why on earth would you cheer on either side in a tit-for-tat?
People are pretending this is about IP or free trade, but it's not like China is going to let people install Signal so US teenagers can install TikTok.
Best case scenario is what, a Chinese operated and moderated version of Facebook while the US administration gets to moderate TikTok in the US? Or the Great US Firewall? Or China just endorses Trump and he drops the whole thing.
There are tons of legitimate criticisms of China but if this isn't motivated by any of them the outcome is unlikely to be help.
China is a dictatorship. No one doing business in or with China does so without knowing that they have to toe the party/government line and could loose everything if they don't
The US is an elected democracy with a strong respect for the rule of law both domestically and internationally (lets not start debating that - historically and compared with China it has) and has attracted foreign capital and investment because of that.
If Trump wants to protect US citizens data then it should tighten privacy law rather than playing nationalistic tit-for-tat which will undermine investor confidence in the US.