Biden backs effort to force sale of TikTok by Chinese owners | Hacker News Reader

Biden backs effort to force sale of TikTok by Chinese owners

wsj.com

7 pointsalwa3 comments

> “They made the point for us,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R., Fla.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in an interview Friday. “They hurt themselves pretty tremendously by doing what they did in targeting members of Congress and using content creators and users of the app as foot soldiers” of the Chinese government, she said.

The pressure campaign puzzles me. I wonder how anyone at the firm could have seriously imagined such a naked and all-out assault would help their case. Are there layers of strategy that I’m missing here?

And, for the fine folks here who know much more than I do about the business side of things—is divestiture really that bad of an outcome for the parent company? What’s lost other than potential upside in the future—and isn’t that potential priced in? Or is the issue that it’s a forced sale against a known deadline, so they may not be able to drive as good of a bargain as they might otherwise?

If one takes TikTok's business at face value, then yes, their analysis of the business might indicate that they'll make more keeping it as a unit of their company rather than whatever they can get by spinning if off or maybe could profit more by spinning it off at another time. But if there's more to TikTok that what they admit, such as it being a tool used by the Chinese government to influence western society and government, then that value only exists as long as it is owned by a compliant Chinese parent company.

> The pressure campaign puzzles me. I wonder how anyone at the firm could have seriously imagined such a naked and all-out assault would help their case.

In a democracy the will of the people should be driving policy, not the irritation level of elected officials. I would assume getting millions of people to advocate for your cause would be the single most effective tactic (in a functioning democracy).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com