Technology

The Chinese app is a completely different app and company than TikTok. ByteDance owns two apps. While we might end up with an American version ByteDance is not going to sell TikTok. And at the closest, that version would be an American corporation running a licensed version of TikTok with TikTok's American server and software infrastructure. But that's not very likely, even with a year's lead time. That's the kind of deal you get when a company exits a market voluntarily. When you have a fire sale you far more often see a company's assets sold as parts. The problem is it's not an equal playing ground anymore and free market principles no longer apply.

So in this case TikTok would still want the most money possible for their buildings, servers, office equipment, etc. That means that all Meta and friends need to do in order to prevent a whole sale is give TikTok a good deal on one aspect. If Meta takes the servers, and Reddit takes the work computers, and Alphabet takes the source code, and Apple takes the buildings, there's not very much left over for a new competitor to grab and turn into a running concern that could compete.

So in this case TikTok itself comes away fine. But the American social media market becomes less competitive and consumers have to deal with shittier apps as there's less competition.

There are two very concerning points to this law in the future though. This is a law allowing the executive branch to make a declaration about a company and force a fire sale. If this was done to a domestic company with foreign backing then it would simply be the end of that company. Second, this does not in any way actually keep the CCP from getting our data or influencing us through social media. In 2016 Russia famously ran an information op through Facebook. There have been no reforms to keep that from happening again and in fact we saw that same campaign in 2020, it just wasn't enough the second time. And American Data Vendors willingly sell our data to the highest bidder, including the CCP. They have been caught doing so multiple times, have received nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and there's no evidence they've stopped.

So this law puts a dangerous precedent into place without solving any of the things it says it's going to solve. The short story here is that unless we're talking about school lunches you need to run away the second a politician says it's for the children.

Oh and it's an open question as to if it's even Constitutional since it's basically a standing authority to ban companies by name. Which is literally called out in the Constitution and why you've never seen a law to punish someone by name in the US. There's supposed to be a court procedure and a law they've violated. If they wanted to make a law saying a company could be banned for giving data to declared enemies and enforce it in civil court that would be proper. But it would immediately fail because all of our Billionaires are ass deep in the data markets. So we have this smoke cloud instead.

Why would they sell? That would create a competitor that could easily expand into other markets and take away that user base as well.