https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
>(17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.
it's pretty obvious from the examples they're talking about B2B transactions, not consumers visiting their site.
> The term “transaction” means any use of any information and communications technology product or service.
To make it more clear, you can read that specific entry as:
"No person may engage in any action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder."
And which part of the act prevents you from visiting tiktok?
Basically what would happen is, Bill gets passed.
The secretary of commerce, or some other figure in that range, talks to the president and they decide yeah, we need to ban those guys.
They talk to apple, Google, Microsoft, various cloud providers, and say "yeah, you're taking them off your store. You're also not allowed to do any business with them anymore".
I don't think it's likely they end up talking to ISPs to try to cut off the internet side of things, because that's going to take a lot more work and the people given power in this case aren't the sort to try to do that sort of thing.
So you're probably never going to be unable to access the website, they're just going to make it a heck of a lot harder to use it, and they're going to cut off all profit motive.
>They talk to apple, Google, Microsoft, various cloud providers, and say "yeah, you're taking them off your store. You're also not allowed to do any business with them anymore"
Yeah, that's what I thought the law does. I think that's bad for other reasons, but the "omg they're going after your VPNs" rhetoric is over the topp.
Given sci-hub is banned at the ISP level here in the UK, I disagree.
>(B) with respect to a transaction found to pose an undue or unacceptable risk and qualify as a covered transaction, determine whether—
>(i) the covered transaction should be prohibited; or
>(ii) any other action should be taken to mitigate the effects of the covered transaction.
I suppose the least charitable interpretation is that this gives them unlimited power to do whatever they want to "mitigate", but that seems like something that would be struck down by the courts for being too broad.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
> (12) MITIGATION MEASURE.—The term “mitigation measure” means a measure agreed to in an agreement between any relevant party and the Federal Government, or ordered by the Federal Government and of which any relevant party has been notified, in any matter addressed under this Act to address any risk arising from a covered transaction or associated with a covered holding.
IANAL but "transaction" in this case surely refers to financial transactions, not just visiting tiktok with VPN on? If the government is sanctioning Iran and say you can't transact with them, it seems fairly reasonable for them to also say that if you try to evade that through various ways you should be punished as well. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply if tiktok is sanctioned.