Well China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too. Will have to see how all of this will pan out.
And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.
If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.
This bill makes that explicit. TikTok doesn't have to be sold to an American. It could be sold to any of the above, and it would comply with the proposed law.
Look at many Europe companies and Microsoft.
You could phrase it thus:
"Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country"
"We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here"
"Then you are banned"
In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit.
These are different.
Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned.
Now you get it?
Then Chinese companies can either choose to play or leave.
With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening.
The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.
And no one misses it.
It’s as pointless and substitutable as any other social network today.
Think about how much human knowledge in Discord servers is hidden from search engines --- in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
I wouldn't refer to highly censored information, disinformation, and discourse controlled by the CCP as "knowledge".
Similarly for western social media. While they're not directly controlled by governments, each platform has its own biases and algorithms that enforce their values and beliefs on the information hosted on their servers. These are not public squares that protect "freedom of speech", regardless of what they may claim.
The knowledge found on these sites is of minimal value, and most of it is drowned by the noise produced by the vast majority of their users and bots.
There's food, technology, science, whatever. I mean sure there's noise in the form of memes like all social media sites, but calling it "minimal value" is pretty extreme.
To take one example, I use Xiaohongshu to read about camera lenses. There's a lot of good information that's not available on Western platforms (optical simulations, anecdotes about rare lenses, etc).
My point is that most content posted on these platforms is heavily modified to game and appease the algorithms that drive engagement. So you never really know if something is factual and honest.
Add to that the fact that these platforms promote content that is actively harmful to its users, and to society as a whole, and I doubt whether whatever valuable information is on them is really worth searching for and consuming. Chances are that you would be able to find the same information elsewhere, without risking your sanity.
That said, I do have an extremely negative view of all social media, and actively avoid it, so I concede that I may be missing out. :)
Outside of the chinanet this also happens, where Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all try to keep you inside their ecosystems (to say nothing of the traditional media companies like Disney, WBD etc), but outside the chinanet there remains a small but influential "information wants to be free" movement that is unaligned with any government or corporation. So we have Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive... It's not much, but it's something.
From my perspective if people really want to see a free and open internet, where information is never hidden in gated communities, the only choice is to support non-profits with aligned missions. Then people all over the world - including China - can contribute.
It's kinda sad that stuff like Caltrain electrification, for example, has a huge and well-researched article despite not even being in service yet, just because of the large amount of Wikipedians in the Bay Area where the Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered. In the meanwhile, entire operational train systems both in China and elsewhere in the world that have vastly greater ridership, longer length, more advanced technology, etc, get nary a mention. I have nothing against Caltrain electrification getting a great article since I'm an inclusionist but it is just sad how little of the cool things, especially in China, are on Wikipedia.
Chinese topics are usually well-covered on the Chinese Wikipedia, the lack of an English-language article is more likely to be attributable to a shortage of English-Chinese bilinguals translating that information.
Do you have some particular train system in mind?
The original problem here is most Chinese tech companies behave exactly like Discord in order to entice people to use their apps and ecosystem exclusively. In fact, in my experience, trying to access information freely on the web is much more difficult in China than it is in many western countries, precisely because the companies are so aggressive about forcing people to install their apps.