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paulddraper

Correct. Any other country on earth, other than:

* China

* North Korea

* Iran

* Cuba

* Russia

* Venezuela

Could sell it to Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Belarus, etc.

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Honest question: what's stopping them from being transferred to a Belizean shell company owned by a company in Delaware with a board full of puppets who blindly do the bidding of the previous owners? Do the CxOs need to be replaced? Are Chinese senior staff members being replaced? Low level staff? What concrete changes are going to be made that will change their behavior?

I oppose this bill because it doesn't seem to do anything to address the actual threats posed by social media. After all, foreign adversaries openly operate on Facebook. Why isn't Zuckerberg being forced to divest? Either all social media is a threat, and that threat needs to be addressed, or this is all theater meant to satisfy the population without tackling the actual issues (if we are honest, the same politicians pushing for this bill benefit from social media influence) .

> what's stopping them from being transferred to a Belizean shell company owned by a company in Delaware with a board full of puppets who blindly do the bidding of the previous owners?

What stops the puppets from ignoring the previous owners?

> What stops the puppets from ignoring the previous owners?

A big paycheck.

Most readers on HN would happily pledge loyalty to the CCP if it meant $1M+ TC.

In fact, many American and European businesses do exactly this.

Doing business is not necessarily pledging loyalty.

You think I pledged loyalty to various employers, even? I mean I told them I did, but I was lying.

> A big paycheck.

So what happens after they’ve received the big paycheque?

I think you’d have a hard time aligning the amount of the paycheques such that the puppets couldn’t get bigger expected future paycheques by doing what they wanted with tiktok.

> I think you’d have a hard time aligning the amount of the paycheques such that the puppets couldn’t get bigger expected future paycheques by doing what they wanted with tiktok.

Presumably the puppets wouldn't have access to the tiktok platform (its code including AI algorithms, data, employees, etc), they'd just be a middle-man that would take the finished product (e.g. the APK) and publish it to distribution platforms (Google and Apple's app stores)?

When it comes to major national security interests, the spirit of the law can be more important than the letter. The law can always be changed, and the eventual outcome will often be worse after each rewrite.

Consider the sanctions against Russia, for example. Some European companies continued doing business in Russia. Everything they did was perfectly legal, and they complied with the sanctions to the letter. But because some officials considered those companies were aiding the Russian war effort, the next round of US sanctions targeted those companies specifically. Then they had to stop all business indefinitely, because no bank was willing to deal with them anymore.

probably nothing beside more scrutiny at point of sale of the buyers

I was about to ask how "foreign adversary" is defined, thanks. Nice to have it official.

What about Hong Kong?

That’s very much China.

As of the executive order on Hong Kong Normalization [1], there is no policy distinction between Hong Kong and China.

The more interesting question is Taiwan, for which the US has taken no official position on sovereignty.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/17/2020-15...

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