Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.

What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"? That's effectively impossible for a publicly traded corporation. Is that just a ban, in practice?

That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.

> There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law

It’s also not a ban on the content. It’s a ban on hosting and the App Store. TikTok.com can still legally resolve to the same content.

You could say that about all the American tech companies that are banned in China. They just have to comply with Chinese law and will be unbanned. For example, Google, unlike Microsoft/Apple, chose to withdraw from China rather than comply with Chinese law.

It doesn’t label ccp. It denigrates four countries as foreign adversaries. And then allows the president to remove any company located in those adversaries.

Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.

Wait is it actually controlled by the CCP? Did they present evidence for policies implemented by TikTok directed by the CCP?

Does divest in this context mean sell it to a non Chinese owner?

Selling TikTok means handing over the source code for the algorithm.

I can see, say, Coca-Cola refusing to sell a local subsidiary if they would be forced to hand over their recipe.

>owever, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.

How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.

80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?

And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.

It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.

it's more specifically ByteDance must divest. The effects that happen because of a divestment by ByteDance, such as TikTok losing access to "the algorithm", are just incidental. The oral arguments for the case are on YouTube and are worth a listen.

Separately, it's hard to get upset about this when China absolutely does not allow similar foreign ownership of large apps in their country. Look at all the hoops, including domestic ownership requirements, required to sell saas or similar in China.

quote from tiktok's webiste https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-myths-vs-facts/: ``` Myth: TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is Chinese owned.

Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company’s founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity. ```

So why is Apple being forced to evict a free app from their store?

> "de facto controlled by CCP"

Where is the evidence for this?

The divestiture clause is just a red herring -- sure, that sounds perfectly fine. But you can substitute it (in the future) with anything.

In the future, the owners of a free press will be permitted to operate if and only if there is board seat made out to a CIA member. Unions will be permitted to congregate as long as they register with the Office of Trade Security

All in all, a huge blow to the potential power of individual rights (essentially goes to the Founding Fathers' point that having a list of rights set in stone is NOT the end-all, be-all, it's who decides the rights that count)