Technology

I read it as a bluff too.

They’re between a rock and a hard place, their best position is to play hardball and rile up their users.

Yeah, it means nothing to us to leave. We’re losing money!

If that were really the case why are they in the US at all? Because they know they can make money and their market position is strong.

The public [who] wants TikTok will get TikTok

In my family and peer group, the people who want to use tiktok and the people who could get and use a VPN to access a side-loaded tiktok app, has no intersect group. It's just a bridge too far for all of them.

I'll push them onto the fediverse yet.

The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.

Has their user base mobilized at all? Maybe it's just because I don't use TikTok but I haven't really heard much from their users about the ban. Which has been kind of unexpected.

It's almost like making money is not the primary purpose of this website 🤔

This means absolutely nothing.

How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US. They have shopping, I’ll bet the US buys the most.

China already has livestream shopping, it’s still relatively novel in the US. Bytedance has to compete with other local competitors in China, hating a nice external source of revenue in the US fuelling these Chinese battle is a huge boon.

I know the article says loss making app, but I bet a lot of money goes back to R&D creating the loss. They pay massive sums to get merchants to sell on their app for example.

If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.

If the sale is forced, the value of the property will be depressed. Why would they take pennies on the dollar to liquidate IP rather than fight it out in court and try to get the provision overturned?

This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.

The law is not specific to TikTok. It is any company owned by a subsidiary of an "enemy" state, of which China is listed as such.

And selling the company to a non-Chinese holding company wouldn't work, because the dispute is over Chinese IP law affecting how ByteDance does business. Move the company overseas and it would no longer be covered by the IP provisions (something the Chinese investors don't want, because they benefit from the IP provisions).

Congress believes it's a national security threat which is probably true but they haven't bothered explaining this to their constituents at all. Ideally they'd pass comprehensive privacy protection laws to setup standards that both domestic and foreign companies would be subject to. Then companies either adjust their behaviors and meet a certain level of transparency or they would be prosecuted under the law.

But no... We get this instead: a confusing and obviously targeted ultimatum with Congress telling everyone 'trust me bro this is the only way'.

The whole point of this bill is for mark zuckerberg’s lobbying money to finally get people to use Reels

I doubt the recommendation algorithm is particularly special, the userbase is the more important thing IMO. However, any purchaser would need to implement something decent if they want to maintain that userbase.

Having read through the bill, here's how it works:

1. TikTok/ByteDance is mentioned specifically in the bill, so they have 270 days (iirc) to divest of "adversary country" influence (meaning China, Iran, Russia, N. Korea), meaning they'd have to be sold to a company based in a non-adversary country
2. assuming they don't comply with 1, any app store ~~or ISP~~ *hosting provider* would be fined if they continue to preserve access to the app
3. users can still use the app, but they have have network access blocked while in the US - so you'd have to use a VPN to use the app

So to circumvent it, basically use a VPN to use the app, and for updates, you'd probably need to side-load on Android or something similar. I don't know how Apple's store works well enough to know what options users have to install and update the app after the ban.

That said, there is no provision for making it illegal to use the app, the onus is entirely on companies facilitating access to the app.

Edit: I was wrong about the ISP. After a reread, it's talking about server hosting. So a server cannot be hosted in the US, nor can a server in the US distribute copies of the app, or host source code for the app.