A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy • Hacker News Board

falcolas wrote: post #30

deathmachine wrote: post #4

Lol, they realize it's a sell-or-ban bill, right? Kind of a moot point when you realize that TikTok as we know it will continue, just without a connection to the CCP. Even if they do ban TikTok the company, the engineers/ML scientists who developed the recommender system powering TikTok still exist, so worst comes to worst someone makes a new company, hires the engineers, and off to the races

China has already indicated it won't sell its 20% share, and so TikTok will be removed from the US app stores. And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before. This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.

> any replacement would be US only

The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#59

Post by jtriangle » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:47 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #39

Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.

They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like.

So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy.

I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like".

Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately.

And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#60

Post by seewhydee » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:52 PM UTC

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #44

seewhydee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beijing has a veto on the sale, and are likely to exercise it. From their point of view, allowing the US to force a Chinese company to sell itself off as soon as it achieves success would set a very bad precedent, and encourage a torrent of other blackmail efforts. They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making…

So the CCP can dish it out but can’t take it. Until the CCP decides to allow a level playing field for US companies operating in China they can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.

Not sure how this is "dishing it out and not taking it". They intend to "take it"; they will force Bytedance not to sell, and thereby lose its US business with no compensation.