The House approved a bill that calls for China tech giant ByteDance to divest TikTok or the popular social video app will effectively be banned in the U.S.
I think delisting it from ios and android appstores would probably be half-sufficient to kill it. Most people won’t go out of their way to sideload an app or use a website. Making it so American advertising companies cannot exchange money with tiktok would probably be the other half. No money, extra effort = dead platform.
Edit: just read the draft bill, it probably deosn’t even go far enough. It does the first half, but not the second half. It looks like under the bill, advertisers as businesses would still be able to interact with the platform, but the platform would only be accessible via a browser, and no US hosting/vps provider could host any of their services. Any violations would be a civil penalty of up to $500/user (presumably with the penalty of completely being cut off from us businesses if they didn’t pay up).
Honestly seems more reasonable than I’d have initially given it credit. It mostly solves the “a foreign adversary could update the app to use my phone as a wiretap” or “a foreign adversary could use their legitimate business dealings to spy from within a datacenter” without actually creating a great firewall.
I don’t like TikTok. As much as I don’t trust social media ran by US companies. I dont like the idea of one ran by a foreign adversary even more.
That said, I’d hate to see the US equivalent of the Chinese firewall come into being because of legislation like this.
I think delisting it from ios and android appstores would probably be half-sufficient to kill it. Most people won’t go out of their way to sideload an app or use a website. Making it so American advertising companies cannot exchange money with tiktok would probably be the other half. No money, extra effort = dead platform.
Edit: just read the draft bill, it probably deosn’t even go far enough. It does the first half, but not the second half. It looks like under the bill, advertisers as businesses would still be able to interact with the platform, but the platform would only be accessible via a browser, and no US hosting/vps provider could host any of their services. Any violations would be a civil penalty of up to $500/user (presumably with the penalty of completely being cut off from us businesses if they didn’t pay up).
Honestly seems more reasonable than I’d have initially given it credit. It mostly solves the “a foreign adversary could update the app to use my phone as a wiretap” or “a foreign adversary could use their legitimate business dealings to spy from within a datacenter” without actually creating a great firewall.
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Protecting Americans From Foriegn Adversary Controlled Applications_3.5.24.pdf