this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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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.