Imagine for a moment you went back into the 1950s and told everyone "hey, let's have all of our television run by the Soviet Union! It's okay though, it's not actually the Soviet Union, it's just a company in the Soviet Union. And we passed a regulation, the regulation says they aren't allowed to use the TV show to do anything bad"
They would think you're out of your mind, and the situation is similar today with TikTok. It doesn't matter how many regulations you put on it.
We should pass such laws regardless, but we also need these bans as well.
Sure there is. An comprehensive data privacy bill would render it impossible to legally collect the data that is necessary for the abuse in the first place.
But that won't happen, because that would kneecap the US companies that these senators have stock in.
You'd have to regulate so harshly that you may as well just nationalize the company
It doesn't matter where the data is if China controls the code. It doesn't matter where the servers are, if China controls the code.
Government oversight doesn't help, because you can't provide the level of depth and insight requires to actually make sure that everything is being done properly.
To exert the proper amount of control and security over a company like this you basically have to nationalize it.
This is Cold War 2.0 boogeymanism. It's "the state of exception" [0]: the idea that normal laws aren't sufficient because the enemy is too clever and too powerful so instead we need exceptional laws. (And afterwards more exceptional laws, because they haven't been defeated yet.)
You bring up what would happen in the 1950s if we hadn't been more careful, but look at the actual 1950s: a time full of paranoid McCarthyism, innocent people being defamed and branded as Soviet sympathizers, the FBI framing people, the CIA testing drugs on unwitting citizens, and almost a nuclear first strike. "National security" logic rarely invites a nuanced and balanced assessment of the threat and possible remedies; rather, it's a kind of dogma that takes for granted that the threat is exceptional and requires an exceptional answer.
The discilpined alternative is to make good laws that enshrine a principle rather than attack an enemy (e.g. data protection, public opinion manipulation). This deals with the problem and also preserves the civil institutions and trust in the rule of law. If the problem morphs, then pass new laws. That's how legislating is supposed to work and how it works for every other problem.
And it's barely cold anymore, trying to actively supplying Russia who is at war with Ukraine today.
And I think you should take a closer look at what happened in the 1950s. If you read your history the Soviets were slightly more than an imaginary threat.
What's the problem with McCarthyism the fact that the Soviet Union was a wonderful great place? No.
None of this applies to something where China literally owns the company. The reason half of Eastern Europe is free today is the fact that we were able to successfully cut the Soviets off of much of global trade. Do the same for China.
The reason the US judicial system isn't cracking down on TikTok is because there's no law preventing what they are doing. If the US passed a comprehensive data privacy & anti-surveillance law, US courts could sue TikTok into oblivion and even potentially levy criminal charges if they continued to refuse to comply.
But they aren't doing that. Instead they are trying to ban TikTok so that the other social media companies (which are all US companies) can continue doing largely the same shit without getting in trouble.
This bill is US economic & political protectionism. It's about banning software, services, and products from other countries without holding domestic companies to the same standard.