(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
The End of TikTok Is a Win for Beijing - The New York Times
2024-05-14 00:00:00
When President Biden signed a bill requiring that TikTok be divested from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, members of Congress hailed the law as a blow to Beijing. They shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate. The law would at best partially mitigate the hazards of misinformation or the risks to national security posed by China. The Communist Party, meanwhile, looks forward to a propaganda windfall, prizing off Washington’s mantle as champion of a free and open internet.
America’s moral authority on maintaining open internet platforms will look very different if it bans TikTok. After years of enduring American sermonizing about free speech and open trade, autocrats would now be able to cite Washington’s own example when they interfere with speech platforms that displease them.
Sponsors of the law say its purpose — prohibiting access to TikTok if it’s not sold to an American entity — is to sever the short-video app’s links to China’s Communist Party. The reality is that the American government will likely end up banning TikTok, turning it off for 170 million American users. Last week, TikTok filed suit to challenge the law. It is not only that nine months is a tight timeline for a corporate sale of this complexity; it’s also that antitrust review alone often takes as long. A tech company like Meta or Google is unlikely to surmount the government’s concerns of acquiring a leading competitor, and there’s no guarantee that a private equity or investor group will be able to pull off this politically fraught deal.
More decisive for TikTok’s destiny in the United States is the will of the Communist Party. In 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce revised its technology export rules to assert control over the export of specialized algorithms. It has left little doubt that the legal change gives the state discretion to reject the sale of TikTok’s algorithm to any foreign entity. Signaling so in its typically oblique way, state media featured the comments of a professor saying exactly that. Whatever the wishes of ByteDance executives or its investors, any sale of TikTok will require Beijing’s blessing.
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[1] URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/opinion/tiktok-sale-ban-legislation-congress-china.html
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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