What I find bizarre about the Tiktok ban is that they are being banned essentially on executive whim: as far as I can tell, there are no concrete allegations, much less evidence, that they're violating any US laws.
But it's not OK for the US to keep out spyware. Heck, retaliation for China's banning of Google etc would be sufficient justification for banning TikTok on its own.
What you are saying is that unless PRC becomes like the US, the US has to become like PRC. I'm amazed how this is not clear to anyone following this. The only way to go forward and not become what you are pointing fingers at is taking the high road. The US is clearly not doing so.
Plus it goes against the US's low restrictions and limitations on doing business.
If US wants to retaliate China by becoming more China, well, surely China isn’t the only one getting hurt.
It's like butting your head against the wall to teach the other fellow not to but his own head against the wall.
The issue isn’t a tit-for-tat they block, we block issue, with the US and China acting like playground children.
The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law.
If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.
That's independent of the rule of law being preferable to the alternative.
The rule of law itself doesn't put much of a constraint on what the government can do, it just requires proper form.
That's not how the rule-of-law works. The bill of attainder doesn't allow the US gov't to punish an entity (or a group of) arbitrarily by legislating.
The legislative and executive branches have already been briefed on privacy and/or security threat Tiktok poses to US. The US senate already passed a bill to ban federal employees from using Tiktok on gov't issued devices, which is exactly what the legislative is supposed to be doing without overreaching and impinging on Americans' civil liberty, and Trump in turn issued executive orders to deter national security/privacy threats from foreign entities. The judicial branch likewise appropriately exercised their power by delaying Trump's EO and challenging his authority.
That's precisely how the rule-of-law is supposed to work in the US -- there is nothing novel or arbitrary here.
The courts are doing exactly that, determining whether the executive has the authority to implement this. This is in fact the rule-of-law in action.
This is also the reason why the rule-of-law is lacking in China, the courts rarely if ever finds against the government in constitutional matters like these. Their system was designed for the CCP to retain power.
Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.
When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.
EDIT2: corrections
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
The US Senate unanimously approved a bill banning federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices last month. So there is some consensus among lawmakers that some sort of privacy and/or security threat exists -- it's hardly on "executive whim."
I suspect the answer is that Tiktok is just doing the same as Facebook etc, and that's unacceptable only because the mined data might go to China.
As an example, they could make it illegal for all video hosting companies operating in the US to censor videos on Taiwan, Tienanmen and Tibet.
Which would probably run afoul of the first amendment. Freedom of speech requires freedom to refrain from speech.
But even if that would fail, I am sure that a team full of lawyer could find something which would be incompatible with Chinese law.
FWIW, Google already has a substantial presence in China, but they don't target consumers there.
I work at a French software company in Shanghai (outside any pilot zone fwiw) and we don't have or need a local partner. Our software is on-prem so data storage is not an issue.
* In a sense that Google didn't want to follow Chinese laws anymore.