> 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.