Mike Masnick: With it looking like the Tiktok ban is going to become law, I wrote yesterday about how this will backfire badly, as we signal that the US no longer believes in an open internet. www.techdirt.com/2024/04/19/t...

With it looking like the Tiktok ban is going to become law, I wrote yesterday about how this will backfire badly, as we signal that the US no longer believes in an open internet. www.techdirt.com/2024/04/19/t...

The US Banning TikTok Would Play Right Into China’s Hands, And Destroy Decades Of US Work On Promoting An Open Internetwww.techdirt.com Apparently, the TikTok ban bill is back. Speaker Mike Johnson plans to include TikTok divestiture legislation already passed by the House in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that th…

I like how we're passing something intended to use the app store as an enforceable chokepoint at the same time DOJ is suing Apple to break up the app store for being monopolistic.

Doesn't this TikTok ban bill allow the government to force ISPs to block access to TikTok's website if TikTok is banned? Seems kinda problematic to have a law that allows the US government to emulate North Korea, Iran AND China. "But it doesn't violate the First Amendment!!1!" they say...

No, it doesn't, and I don't know why Mr. Masnick and others are pretending like it does when the publicly-available text of HR 8038 is pretty clear exactly what it DOES do: prohibit the distribution of the application via marketplaces.

Specifically US-based marketplaces. It doesn't prohibit communicating with ByteDance's servers overseas, it doesn't prohibit writing/running/distributing a compatible application that connects to them, and it doesn't even prohibit obtaining the official app directly from ByteDance and installing it

You can argue that the latter makes this law effectively toothless, and you may be right (though the difficulty of that will certainly have a net positive effect from the stop-Chinese-spying angle), but it's not a violation of the principle of the open Internet or of the First Amendment

Arguments against the bill should be rooted in what the bill actually is, not what you've imagined in your head it is

A judge in Montana disagrees with that statement. www.npr.org/2023/11/30/1...

Federal judge blocks Montana's TikTok ban before it takes effectwww.npr.org The law is seen an important test case. More than a dozen other states are weighing similar bans of the wildly popular video-streaming app, which is owned by a Chinese tech company.

What it also doesn't outlaw: going to the website and browsing it that way

These are 2 completely different things. One involves monopolism, the other 1st amendment and national security. Irrespective of what you think of the incipient TikTok ban or de facto 'nationalisation', they are quite different matters.

Much as I'm very very very happy about funding Ukraine, this is a huge black eye for the US. #interalia

It would be disastrous for citizens of countries like India where they have already started banning apps. This will, as you also pointed in the article, embolden them to do more. @mishi.bsky.social

we do if it's a nazi bar

Does that mean that d-bag Mnuchin gets to buy it & turn it into Truth Social 2.0?

Possibly.

Last I heard, Bobby Kotick was trying to get a posse together to buy it.

Also it is going to rile up a whole lot of folks who might otherwise not have cared to vote.

Sounds like a good thing.

Not if trump wins because of it

That's the part that worries me

Yup all Biden needed to do was not annoy anyone but now he’s riled the TikTokers and the Palestinian supporters. Not helpful.

Didn't seem like a difficult task yet he managed to fumble this as well as other things.

Your other article talked about how this law is probably unconstitutional. Do you think it would actually be overturned by the Supreme Court?

Very possibly.

And is Congress not aware of this? Seems very short-sighted on their part. I don't think it will be a popular move with voters at all.

Congress is full of short-sighted dipshits who don't think or care about the damage their terrible legislation will do

This would look even worse if there were already a history of regulations tailored to target specific actors backfiring badly when they got in the way of larger strategic goals - as might, hypothetically, be described in this book.

Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy|Hardcoverwww.barnesandnoble.com Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber PrizeA Responsible Statecraft best foreign policy book of 2023A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an...

How is this any different from any other economic sanction against a foreign entity? The OFAC sanctions list already includes hundreds of firms that it is illegal to do business with.

Both in terms of mechanism and rationale/purpose, it seems to me that it's no different from the restrictions against doing business with Huawei--legitimate concerns over the national-security implications of communications technology controlled by an increasingly hostile foreign government

The assertion that this is just jealousy over TikTok's success in a market that was heretofore dominated by US firms is just juvenile. Until recently I had a Nokia phone; now I have a Samsung. I'm typing this on a Toshiba laptop. I drive a Toyota.

The list goes on--markets once dominated by US firms, in which foreign companies are now major players, and no one bats an eye.

Yes. We buy all sorts of stuff from Chinese firms any of which could be controlled trivially by the Chinese government. So what distinguishes TT?

If there are ever legitimate concerns that, say, the zipper on my jacket is spying on me, then that would be a problem too, of course; for the time being, however, that remains firmly in tinfoil-hat territory.

1. It's a ban on media. We've never done that. It's a direct attack on speech 2. I have problems with other OFAC decisions as well, and I think the Huawei one, for example, was basically a protectionist move to help Cisco. 3. It's literally demanding a block of a web service (speech). That's new.

They’re gonna keep moving goalposts, contradictring each other, and generally engaging in every other from of logical fallacy and bad faith argument, all to avoid saying “We want the Chinese Exclusion Act back.”

Chinese Exclusion Act - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

It's not a ban on media. It's a ban on doing business with a particular company. If it were a ban on media then the divestment provision wouldn't have been included. If ByteDance sells, no one cares. The issue is being in control of a hostile foreign government.

I'm not going to go into this again. I have discussed it at length. It's a xenophobic, censorial bit of bullshit. I'm out.

As someone who respects you greatly, I don’t expect to draw you into a discussion, but I’ll just say: the use of the word “xenophobic” throws me here, and I think it undermines your contention. I’m pretty sure people can be suspicious of the genocidal Chinese government without being “xenophobic.”

If someone wants to oppose a move like this on free speech grounds, I’d be happy to have that debate. But I think plenty of people have concerns about a totalitarian genocidal government regardless of the ethnicity of the evil men running that government.

Letting the ccp run the algos of a very powerful social media so that they can sow dissent and confusion is insane.

It’s clear to me that China has capability, intent, and opportunity to use TikTok for malice, and that’s really bad. But the US has rules that make all the easy and obvious remedies difficult. I hate the current situation just as much as I hate the proposed solution.

Forcing sale is wrong. Doing nothing is wrong. So what do we do that actually has a meaningful mitigation for the risks? Comprehensive privacy legislation, especially in the wake of expanding FISA, seems almost certainly out of the question in any near term. And would it even work?

your major trade partner, manufacturing base, and owner of your debt is a hostile power? damn sounds like you guys fucked up

Under this law, the "ban on doing business" can include a ban on distributing media produced by the sanctioned company, whether or not any money is changing hands. That is not a normal economic sanction.

No, it does not. That is simply wrong. It applies solely to distributing/maintaining/updating the application itself, "by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store)."

Again, like with any bill the text of HR 8038 is publicly available. Mr. Masnick flat-out misrepresented it by making assertions about its scope and contents that are utterly unsupported by the bill itself.

You've made the implicit assumption that "the application itself" is not media, which is utter nonsense. Even if you were to insist on a distinction under the law between code meant to be expressive and code meant to be functional, it makes no difference in light of the first amendment.

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