Senate passes bill forcing TikTok’s parent company to sell or face ban, sends to Biden for signature. Biden expected to sign on Wed.
Senate passes bill forcing TikTok's parent company to sell or face ban, sends to Biden for signature
I posted this in the other thread, but I'll repost here for discussion:
Ew. I looked through the bill, and here are some parts I have issues with:
So basically, the US can block any form of software (not just social media) distributed by an adversary county for pretty much reason, and it can block any company providing access to anything from an adversary.
The adversary countries are (defined in a separate US code):
So if you live in any of these or work for a company based in any of these, you're subject to the law.
It specifically calls out TikTok and ByteDance, but it also allows the President to denote any other entity in one of those countries as a significant threat.
So here are my issues:
So I think the bill is way too broad (lots of "or"s), and I'm worried it could allow the government to ban competition with US company competitors. It's not as bad as I feared, but I still think it's harmful.
Anyway, thoughts?
and I’m worried it could allow the government to ban competition with US company competitors.
I want to give the benefit of the doubt and say they are concerned about getting programs running all over the country that can somehow "backdoor" a major issue into our network, but I not only don't know enough about how feasible that is, I also strongly believe it's as you feared. It's what we get the government to do all the time: fuck with other countries to "protect" our major corporations...
Why give them the benefit of the doubt? Look at Snowdon"s revelations, they abused FISA courts to rubber stamp spying on US citizens. Why wouldn't they do the same for lobbyists?
I get that TikTok sucks for all manner of reasons, but expanding the power of the executive branch isn't the way to deal with it, especially this way. This is pretty similar to the "force authorization" crap where the President can just bomb whoever the want, provided they let Congress know afterward. But now it's in the economy instead of just military...
So no, I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt, they've lost my trust every other time they've done something like this. The bill is bad and the precedent is sets is bad.
its also them just avoiding writing a privacy bill, yet again.
Well c'mon, if they write a legit privacy bill it's going to hurt their Stateside vectors. This way, they can tout "yay security!" while funneling more traffic to Instabookapp where they can still access it.
I think you should check out this article in The Atlantic, it goes into the history of the US government's previous laws to protect against foreign propaganda and manipulation of the media. What you'll find is this is more of an update (to catch up with the internet era) than a revamp of US domestic policy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/
Also a key point I think you're missing here:
but it also allows the President to denote any other entity in one of those countries as a significant threat
The president can only do this for apps from the countries covered in the US code as Foreign Adversaries, which means the president can act quickly against threats, but this is a bad avenue for attacking competition in other friendly countries (e.g., shutting down Proton would require congress to pass a law that Switzerland is a foreign adversary -- which would not be good for relations -- AND a law specifically targeting Proton accompanying that or the president to then act against Proton).
All of this is still subject to judicial review as well.
What does the judicial review process look like? Because the bill only states (unless I missed it) that the President needs to give notice to Congress.
What it looks like is if China or Russia has a competitor to a US product (say, Yandex or Baidu), a US company (say, Google) could lobby the President to mark them as a threat and ban them from the US. The product doesn't need to actually have the capacity to cause harm, it just needs to be from one of the adversary countries (currently China, Russia, N. Korea, and Iran).
It's not as bad as it could be, but I think it misses a lot of the point here.
Just the standard "you can sue if you think this is unfair and have your day in court."
What it looks like is if China or Russia has a competitor to a US product (say, Yandex or Baidu), a US company (say, Google) could lobby the President to mark them as a threat and ban them from the US. The product doesn’t need to actually have the capacity to cause harm, it just needs to be from one of the adversary countries (currently China, Russia, N. Korea, and Iran).
This is true, but it's also pretty unlikely. Even TikTok is just a vine ripoff, but a vine that was successfully monetized.
There really hasn't been much to come out of our "foreign adversaries" that I think most people would care about. If that's the price we have to pay ... I'm not the least bit worried about it really.
Furthermore, China is happy to use public money to back companies (as a sort of "state run venture capital"); that is a threat to competition in the same way venture capital is a threat to competition.
But is it worth the potential for abuse?
Google and Facebook certainly stand to benefit here since TikTok is a direct competitor. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ban TikTok (I'd like to see some evidence from the FBI though), but it means we should scrutinize the bill to see if there are undesirable parts to it.
Likewise, I think this bill could be used against companies with Chinese investment, like anything Tencent investment (e.g. Fortnite, League of Legends, etc). That's obviously not the target, but I think it could be used to get those banned from the US.
So I'm worried about this bill. Maybe I'm misreading it (I hope so), and it doesn't seem as bad as some people claim, but I do think it's problematic.
Likewise, I think this bill could be used against companies with Chinese investment, like anything Tencent investment (e.g. Fortnite, League of Legends, etc).
IANAL but I believe that would not be covered under this bill. Those games are run by American companies with foreign investment.
Maybe when it gets to the point where the foreign power is the majority shareholder. However, I think in a publicly traded company they'd just be forced to divest and that would likely take a different law.
Here's what I read in the bill:
So if someone from an adversary country directly or indirectly owns at least 20% of the company, which I'm pretty sure applies to what I've said.
But the text needs to apply to a "covered company," which is intended to focus on social media, but here's the text:
So if you have more than 1M monthly active users and allow users to share and view text, images, video, etc with at least 1 person, then you're a covered company. I'm pretty sure that could apply to many things outside of social media.
There's an exclusion in (g)(2)(B) for "product reviews," so maybe EGS is safe, but I'm not sure because the primary purpose of EGS isn't reviews, it's selling games.
However, the above are merely qualifiers, so it must also satisfy section (g)(3), which states either:
So Fortnite, LoL, etc wouldn't be caught immediately by the law like TikTok is because they haven't been specifically mentioned, but I think they quality, so they could be impacted if the President thinks they're a threat to national security. And the burden of proof there is pretty minimal, the President just submits notice to Congress at least 30 days before doing anything about it. If Congress is already in board (lobbyists and whatnot), that won't be an issue.
For timing, you have 165 days from when this law takes effect or 90 days from any action under this law. So here's a scenario:
My understanding is that if the company doesn't challenge the initial public notice (2), they could lose their ability to fight the fines in the courts. So the question is, how much leeway does the President have to obfuscate that so the lawyers miss it? Is it sufficient for the President to post to that White House website?
This scenario is pretty unlikely, but it's just a small bill change away from being a lot easier to sneak through (like making the public notice optional).
The bill is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be (earlier versions were worse), so it's likely this will only apply to TikTok for now. But I'm worried about giving the President so much autonomy here. There's no requirement that the company or app is actually harmful, just that the President decides it's a threat. Oh, and I could probably be fined if I distribute TikTok or similar from a personal website after this bill goes live, though I think I can share a link for them to download it, provided the servers aren't hosted by me and are hosted in another country.