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
What a wild take. You know they spent multiple billions of dollars on advertising to get their userbase? Which without, algorithms don't work. The best algo in the world means nothing if there are only a million people using the thing.
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 less money.
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.
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.
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.
