Before answering, consider carefully whether this is a precedent you want to set. Some in government may want to do the same for Twitter.
Sanction it.
> some in government may want to do the same for Twitter
Difficult to do this with an American, or even allied, country.
The funny aspect to me is that the senators pushing to "ban TikTok" are the same senators pushing for an "open App Store" bill. But I don't see how you can have it both ways.
Sure you can sanction TikTok. Are you going to jail every middle schooler who "does business" with them by downloading the app from unofficial sources?
Or perhaps you want to force ISPs to drop connections to TikTok servers?
They're both about open markets. China is not only a closed market, it's threatening our open-market allies.
> going to jail every middle schooler who "does business" with them by downloading the app from unofficial sources?
If they download the app from unofficial sources and then send it money, somehow, or get money from it, somehow, yes, they'd be treated like someone trading with the Taliban. If they're just using the software, no, that's like using open-source code written by an Iranian.
But if TikTok really is as useful to the Chinese government to be the threat that the politicians trying to ban it make it out to be, surely the Chinese government would be willing to eat those costs to keep it going here.
Without revenue in it, and influencers on it, only few would jump through the insane hoops to sideload an app nowadays.
There's also a lot of overlap between the politicians who want to ban TikTok over concerns that user data might go to China and politicians who block proposed data privacy laws that would stop US companies from selling similar data (or worse, such as ISPs selling browsing data) to data brokers.
Ban TikTok and anyone in China can get similar data on US citizens by just buying it from US data brokers.