As an American, this bill must die.<p>If we want to compete, then we need to do that. Investment not protection is the path forward. Protectionist ideas dont save any one, they just let shitty or inferior products flourish.
> House
House Resolution 7521, dubbed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” passed the U.S. House Of Representatives on a bipartisan 352-65 vote today.<p>352-65, that's what our congress thinks of free speech. Who's next after we set the precedent?
This is good for leveling the playing field. If Facebook, X, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc. are banned/blocked in the PRC, the US should reciprocally return the favor.
I think any challenges to this bill on Constitutional grounds would likely fail due to Congress' powers to regulate interstate commerce, to which SCOTUS has been pretty deferential.
> First, this bill isn’t actually aiming to ban TikTok. It really wants to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to someone else who is not controlled by China<p>Is the US <i>chinaphobic</i> or something? Because they have a good relationship in terms of trade. I'm always reminded of the irony of 'Boycott China' T-Shirts being manufactured in China. As long as the US is the buyer, there's no beef.
The author raises some good points that, I think, are ultimately moot. Most concerns hinge on either the president using this power maliciously or Bytedance not selling Tiktok. The president already has a lot of scary power to wield if they use it maliciously, and our institutions tend to do a good job keeping this in check. What happens if Bytedance chooses not to sell? That will be an interesting world, but not one I'm sure needs to be prepared for.
The loss of data from TikTok would be chilling. It's pushing the world forward at the fastest pace in tech and education, also politics and everything else hence the bill.<p>But the next app covered by the bill <i>that would come to mind</i> as the article mentions is Telegram.<p>Here it's not changing US politics but allows us to watch others politics. We are weakening our power by weakening our citizens.<p>Like restricting 5G we are at war with ourselves doing Chinas work for them.
It's impossible to debate TikTok while people still are not on the same page about the fundamentals which makes this an unusual company that's not comparable to other social networks:<p>1) TikTok is indirectly owned and therefore controlled by Chinese Communist party.<p>2) Given the footprint and influence that TikTok has in the US, the platform has the ability to editorially control what people see and therefore influence perceptions of things such as elections and other hot button issues.<p>3) The widespread installation of an app indirectly controlled by the CCP creates fundamental risk. Eg a number of popular TikTok influencers were actually members of the armed forces who were recording videos in their residences on military properties. Gps and potentially camera access provides information such as troop movements and troop readiness to a potential adversary. At a wider scale, there are similar risks with mass location information of members of the public.<p>The reality is that US companies are not leaned on by the US government for this kind of information about foreign users.<p>Until we acknowledge that this is not a normal situation, it seems moot to debate TikTok under normal trade custom and practice.<p>I've never used tiktok, I've never created an account and I've certainly never installed the app.<p>I was a senior product manager at Uber for a number of years where I witnessed both the encroachment of the Chinese government into our operations and also the significant responsibility of having a GPS enabled app installed on a vast majority of the populations phones while holding all sorts of sensitive demographic information such as the places you visit, your social graph via your contact address book, etc.