Interesting.
When I read this about flawed flaws I was reminded of Wolfgang Pauli to whom the content of the paper of a young physicist apparently seemed so far off that he said it was “not even wrong”.
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If you ask my wife, then yes, but not a joke to me. SCOTUS just isn’t in the mood to entertain vague arguments like “our algorithm is speech.” They’re also uninterested in challenging the government’s perception of what constitutes a security threat.
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Living in a world where Qatar World Cup went on without a hitch I don’t understand how people expect the Oscars to be cancelled
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That is a substantial misrepresentation. The US wouldn’t get any money if Tik-Tok was sold.
ByteDance were told to sell it to any party, whose ownership of it wouldn’t lead to any security concerns, by a set date or to be banned in the US. They chose not to sell.
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I’ve never used TikTok and I consider it a service that is mostly negative for the people that are impressionable, but if we want to be fair we have to consider that it wasn’t much of a choice.
Selling off a whole branch of your business like that doesn’t make much sense because in this case they’d practically have to sell their software/servers to other companies, while the same product still exists elsewhere. Not to mention that going on with such a sale would practically mean that you are admitting that there is a security issue, which would open up the door for other countries to force you to sell their “parts of your company that operate there”, which would totally fragment and ultimately dissolve your company and product.
Not much of a choice, is it?
Let’s say you have an amazing “secret recipe chocolate” in the market and some country goes “hey this might not be safe for our consumers. We do not trust you since the recipe is secret. Sell the recipe to one of your competitors (which we trust) if you want the recipe to keep existing in our country, for no gain for you and your competitors won’t leak your recipe wink-wink-nudge-nudge”. Would you sell it?
Why would you care if that country kept consuming your chocolate if you had no gain from it? 
Similar “know-how” buyouts have happened many times in the car industry, but in those cases the whole company was bought-off. E.g. If your company hadn’t had the know-how to make 4X4 vehicles and you wanted to expand there, then you bought a company that did have the know-how. However noone ever sold “Vauxhall UK and Europe” and some other company got “Vauxhall Australia” and another one had “Vauxhall Asia”. You either bought Vauxhall, as a whole, or you didn’t.
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You make a fair point about the U.S. not directly profiting from the sale. But I’d argue that economic effect of the sale would be significant, and it’s hard not to see financial interests influencing the decision. What else could be driving it? Many Americans seem skeptical of the stated security concerns, especially since the evidence was shown only to Congress. And when the top Senate democrat (Schumer) calls for a delay, along with Trump, it makes you wonder if the security risk is as immediate or severe as it’s been made out to be.
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It’s not like an Elon and a Mark (not you, the cringe one) don’t have competing interests with a bomb-successful social media app…
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speaking of economic effects:
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Might be a bit conspiratorial but when did musk buy Twitter? Did he potentially want to buy tiktok so needed to engineer the circumstances to make this possible? Meanwhile Twitter happened and so now there’s no need to buy another social media network? Probably the dates don’t match up but an interesting thought about why some people might be keen on a sale previous and no so much now.
So who will buy 50% of TikTok?
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Doesn’t this statement imply that the buyer would be the United States itself?
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
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Businesses sell off parts of themselves all of the time, and sometimes they have to do it because of regulatory or legal issues (such as market dominance).
The sale would not involve any such admission since it is required by law. They either sell or cease working in the US.
It would depend on your company structure such as whether you were a sole trader or not. If you have shareholders and someone offers you a very large of money for your company you have to consider which option - bussiness as usual, or accepting the offer - would maximise returns to shareholders. If the IP is owned by the business then it too can be bought as part of the sale. If the IP is owned, in some sense, by you, the founder of the company, then the acquiring business can usually reach some sort of deal. This is standard stuff that lawyers deal with all the time.
Being legally coerced into selling your business or part thereof? Again this happens frequently, usually because of market dominance issues but sometimes on national security issues and the companies involved often end up fighting these decisions in court. In the US, for example, there is an entity called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which is charged with identifying and mitigating risks to US national security that could arise from foreign investments in US businesses. Although it doesn’t always work as well as might hope. In the case of the recent attempted acquisition of US Steel by Nippon Steel, for example, where there could be implications for the supply of steel to the defence industry or to US manufacturing supply chains more generally, the committee wasn’t able to reach a consensus on whether to allow or block the transaction and Biden made the decision instead. There are similar bodies
in other countries.
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The Headline is journalistic shorthand. If you read the link, Trump is talking about US investors rather than the US government.
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I’m not sure where all this conspiratorialism is coming from. I think its being driven by the stated reasons: TikTok apparently tracks people more extensively than many other websites, I gather, and concerns (sometimes verging on paranoia) about the Chinese government among the political class. There have been concerns in many western countries about Huawei products too, so it isn’t just TikTok. If there was a major antivirus and security package being sold by some Chinese software company you could bet that there would be concerns about that too in some quarters (a la Kaspersky). And no one has ever said that the security risk was immediate - that’s why Bytedance was given quite a few months time to sell.
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Speculation is probably due to two factors:
- Key evidence of security risk has not been made public.
- Financial interests (Instagram, Youtube, X) are clear.
Though I think the security risks are clearer for a phone producer, there are significant financial incentives for American companies in this case too (Apple, Pixel, and adjacently, Samsung)
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You can find a summary here. Much of it boils down to a) the fact that people are using a piece of software that tracks them and comes from a frenemy country, and b) TikTok has - either deliberately or indeliberately - given assurances in the past that appear to have been false. Other than the general political atmosphere in the US about China I don’t think there is anything more to it.
I have no idea what your second point is about. The US is forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to US investors because of something something something involving US competitors to TikTok? This is conspiracy theory territory.
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It might sound like conspiracy theory territory, but it’s not like America have never meddled with other countries sovereignty in the past, or do anything shady at congress level.
It’s not somebody claiming the moon landing was a hoax or the earth is flat.
Simply claiming there might be alternative or complementary reasons to force ByteDance to sell.
It’s also not like both can’t be true; it could be that they have legitimate concerns about national security, and that they might find a way to turn a profit. Musk or Zuck might be very interested in getting a hold of TikTok’s algorithm for short form content, because apparently there’s something making people like and care more about TikTok than Instagram reels and other competitors attempts at matching it.
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Yes, they do, but you missed the end of my sentence “while the same product still exists elsewhere”.
For example, it is conceivable that Yamaha will sell its “piano making division”. It happens all the time.
It is however very irregular that Yamaha will sell its “piano division USA” (and the infrastructure and the patents and everything that goes along with them) to a competitor, while it will retain “piano division Japan” and both separate companies will continue to sell “Yamaha pianos”.
I can think of a lot of examples from the first case, none of the second one.
Here is the real issue that is added by the techonological factor:
Let’s say “TikTok USA” is formed. Who and HOW will retain interconnectivity with “TikTok rest of the world”? Which company will run that? And if there is interconnectivity, whatever “security issues” were from tracking or whatever, will persist.
If you say “hey I’ll go along with this, you people are right” then you inadvertedly admit that the issues that you were accused for where valid. Let’s not play coy here.
Yes, again though you sell the whole part of that problem.
Google and Microsoft and Apple have been targeted by such lawsuits. Do you think they’d ever go “yes, I’ll sell Apple Store China, while I retain Apple Store USA”.
There is technology involved that cannot really be “shared”. You either buy and run the whole thing or not.
This is a production company. Conceivably Nippon Steel could proceed and buy some of the factories or mines from US Steel. Steel and mines are not a patent or an app or a server or a special product or an internally produced special engine or a machine, so it can be sold seperately.
In which case, isn’t this already true? From the end of the article:
“Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the U.S.”
So, in order to reach 50% they’d actually have to reduce their influence?
Another one
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