The US has decided to allow people to sue the government for things like this. Doesn't mean they'll win, of course, but having legal recourse in the courts is something that we have decided to allow.

It works out great for fairness usually, and works out great for lawyers' salaries almost always!

Why does China doing something make it ok for the US to do it too?

Because if you keep trying to take the "high road" you'll keep losing your IP and getting nothing for it.

No, by taking the "high road" and valuing freedom and rights, you get global influence and alliances that are worth far, far more in the long run than any short-term profits your IP might get you.

You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state. You get it by valuing individual rights and freedom.

I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it

That only worked when China was a small country economically. Once China passes the U.S. and becomes the #1 economic superpower, none of this matters. These small fish "allies" are not really important.

> I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it

Everything you said here we already know. What you don't realize is the world is going through an invisible war right now at a scale of world war 3. These first world country people have never lived a difficult life so they just think everything will be all right just because it's been all right through their entire life. When China gains its dominance by bullying the rest of the world and the rest of the world just trying to "take the high road", they will realize there's no longer anything they can do about the situation because the Chinese economy has become too strong. This is why countries like India are taking the same route already (They were the ones who banned TikTok first).

There is no permanent "ally" in the world politics. If you naively think "taking the high road" will win you allies even if it means losing your power, you should study history and learn to see long term.

> you get global influence and alliances

The US already has that.

> You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state

Which is why immigrants prefer US to China, banning tic tok is not going to change that.

>No, by taking the "high road" and valuing freedom and rights, you get global influence and alliances that are worth far

How can anyone paying attention to global politics for the past 20 years claim this?

>I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves

The short-term thinking was Western companies doing everything in their power to appease the CCP in order to gain access to a huge market.

You don't have to give your IP away. US "business" men willingly gave the Chinese their IP in exchange for cheap labor. You don't have to do that, that is not the only other option. Enforcing current laws is enough. And if it's not, IF, you enact new constitutional laws.

The best time to have banned US corporations from handing IP to China would have been 40 years ago. The next best time is now. And TikTok has nothing to do with any of this, TikTok's "ban" is just the latest random outburst from an insufferable moron.

If you want to do something about Chinese business practices, than do something within the constraints of the law.

If TikTok wins, it means that we didn't follow our own laws. Either change the laws or follow the current ones.

The executive branch's broad authority to regulate foreign commerce has been a constitutional privilege from the beginning - Jefferson strongly advocated for it, for example. Only legislation would disallow this order from going through.

Then the lawsuit will fail, and the system works. What is the problem, then?

Even when the judiciary system works as it's supposed to, that doesn't necessarily mean that justice is being fairly delivered, which would mean there is a problem with the law itself. I think detractors here are misunderstanding what is currently the law and what they think should be the law, in this case.

What laws are those?

Whichever ones TikTok is using to sue? Either they have a case or they don’t, but they still deserve their day in court.

You do gain something, namely you don't become the same as the people you're implying are worse than you. If everyone is on the same level, nobody is an improvement over anyone else and the contrast is a purely cosmetic one.

What is it the US of A is now "getting"?

US companies get access to one market while Chinese companies get access to both markets. While this isn't exactly fair, I don't think Americans are bothered by this. But I guess that won't be the case when most of the Americans get used to a Chinese app and criticism of the CCP is suppressed.

I assure you, all american entrepreneurs are deeply bothered by this.

Uber lost in China mainly because of this.

Which American companies are actually banned/blocked in China because they are American companies?

China's basis is that foreign companies won't respect their laws. What US laws has TikTok broken? Privacy isn't protected because an entire domestic industry has bought off Congress. Why can't a foreign company participate in the same?

> What US laws has TikTok broken?

The legal basis for the Order banning Tik Tok [1] came from Order 13873 [2]. It's...not the best.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/05/17/2019-10...

The issue here is until Congress intervenes, foreign affairs power still is within the executive branches jurisdiction... Which is increasingly tumultuous with Congress flipping underneath the president every cycle it feels like.

You aren't wrong, but it's fairly easy to make a plausible argument for national security.

You can argue nation security when it comes to any app that isn't doing end-to-end, especially if it's written in a way that could allow the first, or a third party, to get access to arbitrary user data with the plausible deniability that security bugs can offer.

TikTok has had security bugs that made me outright mad when I looked at an expose on some of them. The kind of comedically terrible bugs they've had not too long ago makes it absolutely certain there are many, many more. Not even checking which user is logged in when you send a message for the user? Seriously, that's embarrassing in a rarely used feature on an app with a handful of users. Core functionality on a hundreds of millions users app? That's so terrible I almost can't believe it.

Not that other apps don't have bugs, but the track record, and global spread would make a solid argument. Confound by their app appearing to spread the data over an absolutely massive number of domains, and hosts, making auditing very hard, and also attribution of blame if data gets in the wrong hand.

I'm not saying eg Facebook is necessarily much different, only what argument can be made. Incidentally, what TikTok is doing is almost certainly illegal in EU, as I have no information that they have even attempted to follow GDPR rules.

> China's basis is that foreign companies won't respect their laws

This is fallacious.

China is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy under the rule of law. There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

International free market trade is founded on reciprocity - you open your markets and I open mine, under analogous regulatory conditions. Can US companies such as Facebook or Google operate with the same degree of freedom that TikTok does in the West?

Furthermore, and perhaps more relevantly to your question of whether TikTok has broken any US laws, it may be that it has. I have a very limited understanding of US politics and law but I do know that (a) there's a trainload of highly complex national security regulations, (b) Executive Orders provide the President a means to "steer" the application of the Law, and in this case it may be simply a way of enforcing codes that have been applied very loosely or not enforced until at all now.

I don't know if the EO will hold ground or not, but if it doesn't, I hope the US (and eventually the EU, where I am a citizen) find other ways to legally challenge the abhorrent asymmetry in playing conditions for software companies in China vs. the Democratic West.

> China is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy under the rule of law. There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

Would you say it's kind of like the US President being able to just ban things he just says are threats to National Security? All of the authoritarian regimes have laws that specifically allow them to do what they do. They're usually authoritarian because they can and do call everything they don't like a threat to National Security.

Where is the actual proof here? Where can everyone take a look at it?

Absolutely not, because the separation of powers guarantees that if he botches the Executive Order and it has no legal ground, it will fall under the weight of the Law.

No such mechanisms exists in an authoritarian regime like the Chinese.

I'm not sure what you're on about. Authoritarian states do have laws to justify what they do. Even Saudi Arabia has them. You can get a lawyer, you can get a judge to review your case, you can appeal decisions. They do have separation of power as well.

Read up about the countless cases in those countries. Enforcing national security laws are very, very often the reason for the most fucked up judgements. All those cases from North Korea? Yep, national security without verifiable proof of how it endangers national security.

> Authoritarian states do have laws to justify what they do

From my original comment, which you replied to:

> There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

Either you didn't read that part, chose to omit it, or you are being deliberately rude, questioning "what I'm on about".

The difference between those authoritarian regimes and a democracy under the Rule of Law like the US is the degree in which the law can be arbitrarily superseded by an authority, such as a Party or Ruler, breaking the separation of powers.

Comparing the legal systems and guarantees of China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, with those of the US is disingenuous at best.

You did not address the fundamental point which is that an Executive Order can be challenged in a Court of Law - it will be, in fact.

Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?

> You did not address the fundamental point which is that an Executive Order can be challenged in a Court of Law - it will be, in fact.

> Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?

Yes, absolutely. It happens all the time. Those rulers use _the laws afforded to them_ to rule. It's completely wrong to suggest that they just do whatever the hell they want. That's just not the case at all. Please look into the topic. Those countries have laws that make it very, very easy for the rulers to justify doing whatever they want.

MBS can put you in jail for live not because he's free to do whatever he wants but because the laws are designed in a way that gives him every reason to justify putting anyone in jail - as I mentioned, usually based on national security grounds.

Those very same national security reasons that authoritarian regimes constantly use are being used by Trump.

So yes, Trump being able to claim something a national security issue without having to provide proof, without giving the accused a chance to take a look at the evidence that supposedly exists against them, without them being able to defend themselves from the accusations, that's exactly what authoritarian regimes do.

You are absolutely delusional if you think dictatorships work under strict Rule of Law like democracies. This is basic middle school stuff - ideas that have been developed during centuries by the liberal tradition and even hark back to the Classical world - so I'm not going to bother debating it here.

I will however leave some data, from the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020 [1]. These indices measure how strong the Rule of Law is in each country:

Germany - 0.84

United Kingdom - 0.79

Japan - 0.78

US - 0.73

France - 0.73

South Korea - 0.73

---

China - 0.48

Russia - 0.47

Turkey - 0.43

There's no data for North Korea or Saudi Arabia, because they're so closed that there's not even a point in trying to judge the quality of their legal system. Go figure.

[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/publications/rule-l...

I don't think this matters in the question. In regards with US tech companies banned in China, all of them are banned for violating Chinese laws. If you believe there is a major exception to this, name it.

>Why can't a foreign company participate in the same?

Basically foreign owned companies don't have the same constitutional rights as ones owned by US citizens - these companies operations basically being foreign commerce is where the entity list powers are derived from.

I don't believe you are correct. In the US corporations enjoy "Corporate Personhood", e.g. the corporation itself enjoys many of the same rights as a US person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Whether TikTok is registered as a US company may be relevant however (I would expect their local operations would be).

>I don't believe you are correct. In the US corporations enjoy "Corporate Personhood", e.g. the corporation itself enjoys many of the same rights as a US person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Whether TikTok is registered as a US company may be relevant however (I would expect their local operations would be).

Foreign ownership doesn't enjoy the same rights as LLCs registered in the US, ironically. For example, even though Huawei operated in the US through a US LLC, Trump still regulated its associations as defined by the foreign affairs power - as well as how corporations with US operations interacted with these foreign associated Huawei entities.

Otherwise corporate personhood would anull all trade deals in the US, and I think even the article you linked mentions their limited protections in the US.

This would be a better argument if the US was doing the same thing China is doing.

China has censorship laws that you might not like, but you can certainly still choose to comply if you want to be in that market. Indeed, many US companies have chosen to do so and participate in that market while others feel the cost is too high and do not.

What could TikTok do to comply here and be allowed in the US? It wasn't banned for non-compliance in some tit-for-tat measure, it was banned for simply being from China.

That's not correct. To enter the Chinese market you need to do it with a Chinese company.

That’s not correct. Tesla did not partner with any Chinese company.

Tesla makes cars, not social media apps.

I keep seeing comments like this

There are reasons you can oppose this ban, but this isn't a good one of those reasons.

-

The US promises certain freedoms and protections, and TikTok is saying the US is unfairly denying them those freedoms and protections.

China doesn't promise those things to anyone, so there's no grounds to complain they're not being fair.

I mean, imagine this argument applied to other things. "They don't allow <insert liberty> in their home country, why are they suing the US for denying <insert liberty>?"

I agree, I don't fully understand why the comparison is being made here. There are plenty of things that are unfair on either side as far as the law goes; Chinese and US businesses have dealt with that for years unimpeded.

The more interesting question is my eyes is who's going to benefit/hurt from all this and why - US consumers, US/Chinese tech cos, US/Chinese foreign interests? I'd love to hear opinions on this aspect.

Like another comment said, it'll be interesting to see what comes out in discovery.

This makes me think about it mathematically. C(us) -> M{us}; C(ch) -> M{us,ch}; P(c) proportional M; S{C} -> P;

Where, the company with greater market access, has greater access to profit, and then greater chances of winning. We strip away all other pretenses, it might just boil down to, S(C(us)) < S(C(ch)), which is just a consequence of the rule set. No way forward, when S(C(us)) > S(C(ch)) is the goal, changing the rule set is the only available action.

How does the Chinese government sue the us government for not having American rights? This literally makes no sense. How can do many people here not understand that Chinese created companies literally are owned and operated by their gov? How do you think the great firewall/mass gov censureship/social scores work?

Oh please.

You're trying to intentionally confuse to tangential concepts, and murdering common sense and logic to do so.

Amtrak is almost entirely owned by the US Government and has taken in 10s of billion of federal dollars to operate, yet you can go out and sue it like any other company despite the protections US Government entities normally have.

Because owning something, and being that thing, are not the same thing... in case you didn't realize. That's actually one of the core justifications of most corporations

-

The Chinese government is not suing the US Government, TikTok is. Sure there's lots of fun power dynamics to dive into over who controls TikTok and so on, but if you can't get the simple fact of who's suing who, you should hush up on the topic.

Yes, China does censor sites and apps. But is it really good to censor sites and apps just like they do? Aren't we better than that? Do we want anyone having that sort of power?

The aspect I believe you're missing is that any Chinese company with over 50 employees is not a legitimate private company because the CCP essentially claims ownership over them. This means ByteDance is essentially state run and makes the national security risk a legitimate concern.

I believe the national security risk argument is stronger in the case of Huawei. Since having a state run company build essential communication infrastructure is clearly a bad idea. However, I think it also applies to ByteDance. Why would you allow a foreign government uninhibited access to huge amounts of data about your citizens? Especially when that government is a hostile totalitarian regime currently engaged in serious human rights violations.

Well, regardless of being private or public, a foreign owned company having US operations doesn't guarantee it the rights as the US operated equivalent. Foreign commerce is regulated by both the executive and legislative branch - there are no constitutionally guaranteed rights for foreign commerce.

We already allow Apple (50% of the market) to censor any App they want and ban third party app stores. So no we are not better than that.

> People would say "China can decide what they want to allow".

Who are you defining as “people”? I’ve only ever seen people criticize their bans on media.

Who said that TikTok == China? Maybe, just maybe, they made this as an independent company to continue biz in the US?

Also just maybe, they don't want that facebooks clone (Reels) now takes their place?

Maybe they don't want to be sh*t all over just cuz they are based in China and do simply not care about the conflicts the countries have?

China is a totalitarian regime which doesn't follow due process and basic freedoms.

I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil. US is supposed to be better than that, remember?

The free market is a two way thing. What, you wanna allow a totalitarian regime to have it's companies operating in your soil while expanding their influence?

This situation should've been stopped a while ago, China banned every company they wanted while the others let them operate everywhere according to the free market rules.

Free market does not need to be a two way thing to function. If the Chinese have to spend their money on non-US goods, those earning thw profits will be more inclined to spend their money on US goods.

Exports is what you pay for your imports. It's better for US citizens to be able to buy Chinese products even if Chinese citizens can't buy us products. They can pay for it by exporting to other countries from which China buys.

Meanwhile, when smaller countries (for example post communist ones) try to protect like that, all Americans were yelling "free market, free market, gotta open it completely and absolutely for the good of all!"

>I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil. US is supposed to be better than that, remember?

I think the issue here is that it's a foreign owned business. I know tit-for-tat might be happening in the eyes of US law makers, but many of the constitutional protections we afford citizens are only extended as a convenience to non-citizens - a convenience usually rooted in positive trade relationships.

There's no "basic right" of foreign businesses to do business in the United States.

What about the right of citizens to install whatever software they want on their phones?

They never had that. e.g. Apple.

To be more specific, it would be Apple preventing you from doing it in this case.

If you had a phone that let you install software on it of your choosing then you could install whatever you want, regardless of who Apple isn't allowed to do business with. They made themselves a chokepoint, so now they're a chokepoint.

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around... no, your phone's only route is through the one corporation.

You're free to jailbreak your phone if you want to exercise that right. And Apple is free to deny you updates and service if you do that.

How so? Americans have the right to trade with foreign companies. Apple should have the right to trade with foreign companies, in this case, TikTok.

US restrictions on foreign trade are restrictions on Americans.

>Americans have the right to trade with foreign companies

Err, foreign affairs (and thus commerce) has always been something regulated by the US government - something reserved for the president unless the legislative explicitly declares otherwise. Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...

Do you know any constitutional clause or SCOTUS case suggesting otherwise?

There is no right to trade with foreign companies. Try doing business with a North Korean company and see how that goes for you.

Americans have no such right — the US government has the authority to impose economic sanctions on foreign governments that explicitly prohibit doing business with their companies.

> basic rights of people and businesses

Expand on these basic rights that are violated if TikTok is banned. And since when do foreign businesses have basic rights in US or any other democracy?

What basic rights are you worried about?

> I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil.

Your enemy brakes rules to gain advantage, why wouldn't you.

I for long thought of this as a weakness in America.

Thousands of children of CPC's top leadership live, and study in USA, including children of Xi, Li, and Lin.

Your solution to solve your problem with China overnight was pretty much lying under your nose.

Think, not a single government employee in China can legally afford to pay for their children tuition in Harvard (which people in China jokingly call "the new Central Party School.") The salary of a government employee in China is legally capped at around CNY 32000. There is no way in hell even Chinese government ministers can pay for their children lavish lifestyles in the West from legit income.

> Your enemy brakes rules to gain advantage, why wouldn't you.

Probably because if your "enemy" (interesting that this wording started to pop up in relation to China a lot) is a totalitarian state which abuses their people... you don't want to follow their rules and societal structure.

At least that's my takeaway as an Eastern European with a bit of experience of such regimes.

Well, take a look on Mr Obama, and what legal trickery he went through to drone his own citizen (Awlaki.) Now, America can drone own citizens, but can't do this?

That makes sense from a common sense point of view, but from a legal point of view, it's much more complicated.

China is a different jurisdiction with different legislation, different constitution and a different justice system. It's a completely different set of rules... If an American company sues China... the outcome will be decided on Chinese courts, based on Chinese legislation and Chinese constitutionality.

TikTok will fight the US in US courts, abiding to US legislation, US constitutionality, etc... In the end, it will be up to a judge or eventually the US Supreme Court to decide what happens.

Is the chinese "law" the law in the US now? Should we get rid of all government branches and just copy what they do?

People would say "This lawsuit is unlikely to succeed in an authoritarian state and either way the important thing is not whether US companies can operate there, but the Chinese government's violations of human rights and curtailing of freedom of their own citizens, and that's what we should be using our social and economic power to address."

If the "game" is censorship and social control of citizens, why on earth would you cheer on either side in a tit-for-tat?

People are pretending this is about IP or free trade, but it's not like China is going to let people install Signal so US teenagers can install TikTok.

Best case scenario is what, a Chinese operated and moderated version of Facebook while the US administration gets to moderate TikTok in the US? Or the Great US Firewall? Or China just endorses Trump and he drops the whole thing.

There are tons of legitimate criticisms of China but if this isn't motivated by any of them the outcome is unlikely to be help.

> two can play this game

China is a dictatorship. No one doing business in or with China does so without knowing that they have to toe the party/government line and could loose everything if they don't

The US is an elected democracy with a strong respect for the rule of law both domestically and internationally (lets not start debating that - historically and compared with China it has) and has attracted foreign capital and investment because of that.

If Trump wants to protect US citizens data then it should tighten privacy law rather than playing nationalistic tit-for-tat which will undermine investor confidence in the US.

So America is no different from China. Got it.