TikTok Sues U.S. Government over Law Forcing Sale or Ban | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Sues U.S. Government over Law Forcing Sale or Ban

nytimes.com

33 pointsjmsflknr50 comments

Other than the trademark and brand recognition, is there anything remaining that a US company would want to purchase and be able to use and support? Is the source code written in English? Is TikTok using operating systems, software, scripts, etc that are only in common use within China and don't have ready replacements that a US company would want to alternatively use? Any proprietary software in use which is owned by a Chinese company that doesn't want to sell it? Has the Chinese parent company written excellent documentation in English that could be provided to a successful bidder to get a US team of developers ready to operate and support a sovereign US instance of TikTok?

Due to these likely and insurmountable problems, it appears that TikTok is already practically "banned" with 9-12 months notice period. "Banned" perhaps not in the sense of users being unable to access TikTok as hosted in data centres outside of the US (related: Apple being pressured into allowing sideloading), but perhaps "banned" from the perspective of sanctions blocking USD$16 billion in revenue in the US, and similar impacts to European revenue, etc.[1]

Will TikTok want to host offshore and cater to US/European customers even though they may receive no revenue from these customers due to financial blockages?

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/275bd036-8bc2-4308-a5c9-d288325b9...

The users are the most valuable part.

To quote Judge Easterbrook from the 7th Circuit: So what? Who cares? If TikTok and its parent have been remiss in documentation or the ability of the entity to operate on its own in America then that’s their problem. When cigarette advertising was outlawed we didn’t ask whether there was a sufficient alternative advertising pipeline for the tobacco companies to access teens. The law only “bans” TikTok insofar as TikTok refuses to comply. You might say “this is beyond TikTok’s control because China won’t permit it” but why should the USA care about that?

If you are a luddite like myself, I would recommend you take a look at this CRS primer about this issue. It’s short, succinct, and provides context with comprehensive citations: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11127

Thanks for sharing, this is a refreshingly factual take in contrast to the emotionally-charged rants this topic seems to inspire.

For context, here are the powers the FCC has long exercised around foreign ownership of American radio stations [1].

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...

Is that really applicable? I thought the FCC only had authority over these kinds of stations because the airwaves are a limited public resource.

> Is that really applicable?

Yes. Congress gave the FCC the power to block foreign control of American radio stations. Rebrand the TikTok bill as a 20% cap on foreign control of social media apps with a laundry list of exceptions (everyone but our adversaries) and it’s in the same ballpark.

> because the airwaves are a limited public resource

To grant licenses, sure. But the foreign ownership component is orthogonal to that. App stores are our new airwaves.

> App stores are our new airwaves

App stores aren’t limited except artificially

> App stores aren’t limited except artificially

The point is this limitation is irrelevant. We've had foreign ownership limits on plenty of industries in America, radio is just the closest in being a literal medium of speech.

But there is no restriction on American listeners tuning in to foreign radio stations.

Americans are free to read foreign books, watch foreign news, browse foreign websites.

And this bill contemplates no restriction on Americans consuming TikTok’s content (e.g. online). They just can’t do it through an app distributed via an app store.

The most novel thing about this is: popularity has soo little to do with technically good/useful/unique Why is so much effort and money thrown up against these random giants of "popular by chance"? Why not put the same effort and money into trying to make 100 competitors? You might accidentally cause innovation instead of waste

Because the institutions doing the against part are institutionally incapable of these type of creative endeavors

This case is very interesting to me. China is clearly using TikTok for the nefarious purposes and it is clearly perceived as threat, while West wasn't able to do anything about it for a while due to Western way of conducting business and following laws.

What clearly nefarious purposes are you referring to?

As far as I know, the argument for forcing TikTok to divest is simply that Americans don't trust a Chinese owned company not to be used as a secret CCP weapon to undermine American democracy as a pretext to total war (or something,) but TikTok hasn't actually done anything to merit that mistrust. They're just another app full of memes.

> They're just another app full of memes. That meme app got banned from US military bases.

> TikTok hasn't actually done anything to merit that mistrust. Between dumping all the info to China and having an excellent exploit window on millions of phones, don't see why we should trust them ?

I like the idea that everything that's banned from military bases should be banned everywhere. That's definitely the way to run a free country.

I don't see why we should trust them any less than our own government and its relationship with every domestic large social media platform.

I couldn't care less if China gets my TikTok browsing history or whatever, they can't touch me. I do care that my own government seems to be rapidly trying to censor and weaponize social media while telling me to stay scared of a nebulous foreign enemy they've been trotting out in the name of authoritarianism since the 1950s. All of our data is already being sent to the NSA and they probably already have root on every electronic device you use, and they still kill people over metadata. Meanwhile someone's Google search/maps history can land them behind bars in some states, just for reading the wrong books or searching for the wrong kinds of medicine, because it turns out inalienable rights are very much alienable.

So yeah. Tell me why I should be more concerned about what China might do, as opposed to what my own government is already doing?

One perhaps far fetched implication is that too many Americans could become unemployable by the US Govt. the chief concern of clearance interviews is eliminating risk that information about you can be used to gain leverage over you.

It’s easy to dream up scenarios from something as simple as the way that China treats GPS: in addition to the regular block-google-maps-from-showing-military-bases they also use an entirely different system whose purpose is only to occlude real locations (https://medium.com/@anastasia.bizyayeva/every-map-of-china-i...)

TikTok harvests the very thing china occludes.

I don't understand what the implied threat is supposed to be here. That TikTok harvests... American GPS data? That the CCP might use TikTok to find the real world locations of American military bases? How would that even work? Why would China need TikTok to accomplish this? They have spy satellites. If they want to send the ICBMs over they already know where Washington DC is.

This is comic book logic, this isn't rational.

Again, there must be value to China with regard to GPS data if they have spent so much effort in obscuring it for so long. Therefore it would make sense that there is an interest in harvesting it.

It shouldn’t be required of me to dream up scenarios that you may or may not agree with. You have no view into their government or our government either.

But to play the game, as you’ve already pointed out: anyone can determine military base locations without the thousands of social media accounts in TikTok that would dot those bases. So what could that give them? Correlation. I’m sure that there are plenty of different avenues they have to get intel on who works where, and as a government contractor we received plenty of training to avoid publishing it anywhere (e.g on LinkedIn or Facebook). Would a government, that harvests data for future use, limit itself to a few chosen avenues?

As far as I know, the argument for forcing TikTok to divest is simply that Americans don't trust a Chinese owned company not to be used as a secret CCP weapon

Essentially yes, and that seems like a perfectly valid argument to me.

TikTok hasn't actually done anything to merit that mistrust

They've lied about storing data in China and spied on journalists. But that actually doesn't matter; the point is that it's crazy to allow the Chinese Communist Party to have access to loads of personal information about hundreds of millions of Americans.

This TikTok ban is mostly about being able to control the media narrative that is being broadcasted on TikTok. The other social media companies seem to be complying with US censorship guidelines. But this is not so for Tiktok which has been accused of promoting pro Hamas content.[1][2]

I’m more interested in knowing Would a Bytedance stock IPO in a US stock exchange circumvent the ownership requirements?

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://news.google.com/search?q=Tiktok%20hamas

IPO would not, so long as ByteDance remains a controlling parent. There have been a number of CCP-affiliated companies which have been delisted in US in recent years.

There has been interest in a ban for years. You’ll need stronger evidence than a random comment from someone that wasn’t even involved in passing the bill.

The China Hawks would have gotten the ban done years ago if they could have. It doesn't take much to connect the dots here. It was support from the Amen Israel crowd that made this happen.

Rep. Mike Lawler who co-sponsored the legislation behind the prospective TikTok ban said as much.

https://theintercept.com/2024/05/04/josh-gottheimer-mike-law...

There has been interest before and it died yet the interest resurged after Israel war. Many politicians have said as much. Why else would a TikTok bill be included in a war package for Israel? Every politician can now hide behind the war ammunition argument, while going against the ban in name.

Here is another article: https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...

It's funny how TikTok took Vine's short video concept and brought it to another level, meaning US was the original innovator not the Chinese. If Facebook or Google acquired Vine back in the day, TikTok wouldn't probably exist or maybe it would if Google would shut down Vine or if Zuck would screw up Vine. Now US has to deal with the fact that foreign entrepreneurs know also how to make viral apps but let's be honest China is not the one you would trust with your personal phone and your personal data.

Vine had a 6 seconds limit, TikTok has a 10 minute limit now. It's not about short videos, it's about the algorithm.

>It's not about short videos, it's about the algorithm.

People have short attention span so it was about short videos and yea it's also about discovery algorithm. Vine didn't have a chance at Twitter and now Twitter is going down as well....oh well. Tbh I never used Vine nor TikTok, I just read about them but did Vine have some sort of discovery feature akin to TikTok or YouTube?

People don't have to watch videos to the end, so the attention span doesn't matter.

So if you have a short attention span would you prefer watching 10 minutes of 2 hour movie or you would rather prefer watching 10 minutes of 10 seconds funny videos on TikTok?!

Different formats are meant for different purposes, in another words you can't half ass movie, documentary or whatever long form video content type there exists....you have to watch it till the end, either in one go or in multiple takes.

For example YouTube became popular because it allowed on demand video of "short" video content, short compared to TV. As kids, teens and people in general became internet dopamine addicts, they sought more faster and "instant" form of entertainment and rest is history.

The same conceptual connection can be drawn with traditional "long" form video games and casual and hypercasual mobile games. People became more lazy and and the same time more "thirsty" for dopamine and mobile devs exploited that need with casual and hypercasual mobile games.

YouTube initially had a 10 minute limit to stop people from uploading entire episodes of TV shows, and dropped that limit as soon as it had ways to identify pirated content. There are many things on YouTube today which are longer then anything comparable on TV, like 6 hour interviews.

Court Filing: https://sf16-va.tiktokcdn.com/obj/eden-va2/hkluhazhjeh7jr/AS...

Non-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/business/tiktok-ban-appea...

Good. I think it should be banned but testing this in court is also very important.

Anyone got a link that isn't paywalled? Archive.org is still blocked.

https://archive.is/Q8pcR

Reply on news.ycombinator.com