this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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I don't think that the government cares much about whether a company is extracting information and using it to sell ads. I do think that they care about whether that company is using that information to target governments.
I think that that position is understandable.
What I am skeptical of is the solution. Is having ByteDance divest going to avoid other ways of accomplishing the same thing? How many popular phone apps are out there that could gather data? How many other media sources can be influenced?
And for that matter, the US only has jurisdiction to the extent that TikTok does business in the US. If something like it were to provide free service over the Internet, not sell ads or whatnot in the US, it doesn't fall under US jurisdiction.
Actually, that's a point where there is precedent to the contrary. The GDPR claims extraterritoriality even if there is no payments involved, if the free services are provided to EU citizens. It enforces it by proxy, mostly through international agreements, like in the case of US companies.
It's under US jurisdiction if it's on the app stores.
The US government could require Apple and Google to block it from going through their stores anywhere on the planet as US companies.
Okay, that may be a valid point, though I don't know what would happen at the polititical level if that actually occurred. If it did, I could imagine China, if the government felt that it were a sufficiently-critical tool, slugging back. Google and Apple also have a business presence in China, so the PRC has similar jurisdiction and could require them to include it, and we'd be looking at a heck of an economic schism or trade war or something.
Actually happening worldwide isn't likely. But Google and Apple would not be able to comply with China in that case. They'd be obligated to leave the market. They're US companies. US Law supersedes any other obligations. And it wouldn't be the first time the US government has forbidden any business with a foreign company.
"If the government felt it was a sufficiently critical tool" is exactly why banning it is a genuine possibility, though. Because the Chinese government does exercise far more direct control of how their companies operate, and that control does make TikTok a very real threat to national security.
If Apple and Google were French companies, for example, though, banning it from the US app stores would still be completely within the government's authority and would be unlikely to create any real tension between the US and France. Telling them they had to ban it globally or be banned from the US probably would, but sovereignty means being able to put some limitations on interactions between foreign companies within your market.
Only from in the eyes of the US legal system. The Chinese legal system won't see it that way.
They can place conflicting demands on a company; they don't have to be compatible.
They'd be placed under conflicting demands. They might well choose to exit, but it isn't that one set of constraints is superior to another. Look at the current scenario, which is the mirror image of that -- Bytedance is being required to divest. They could divest, or could exit the US market.
Honestly, with the way geopolitics is going right now, outright deglobalization sometime this century seems inevitable. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the current tensions turn into de facto Cold War II, with regional blocs that outright ban any trade or positive discourse about the other side, and hold high profile hearings on dissidents suspected of following the ideology of the other side.
Their entire governance is the US legal system. They do not exist outside of it.