There's nothing special about being an app.

And the right comes from their Constitutional power to regulate foreign commerce. The US has a fairly long history of enacting sanctions against foreign entities for various reasons that work pretty much the same way - by preventing American companies from doing business with them.

I'm sure there's case law all over the place, but effectively the Surpreme Court unanimously decided that the US definitely has a right to protect itself from foreign influence. This is diplomacy.

And for anyone living in North Korea who ever has a chance to read your comment, I'm sorry, this person has no idea what it means to live in a police state under a belligerent dictator.

a police state

Grindr was forcibly divested, so yes, it has happened

Father Coughlin's periodical Social Justice was denied a mailing permit during World War II for airing pro-Nazi material (such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) under the authority of the Espionage Act of 1917, which limited its distribution to news stands in the Boston area. I don't think America has faced a political rival like China since the Soviet Union; not sure if there were any restrictions on the distribution of Soviet software in the late 80s.

> I don't think America has faced a political rival like China since the Soviet Union; not sure if there were any restrictions on the distribution of Soviet software in the late 80s.

I doubt there were, because it would have been moot: the Soviets were so far behind on computer technology that they didn't really make anything anyone would want.

But more generally, the US was a lot smarter about trade with adversaries during the Cold War. There were significant restrictions on trade with the Communist Bloc that limited the kinds of entanglements we now have with China. The US got really stupid and overconfident after the Cold War ended, and that's only slowly starting to change (and this TikTok "ban" is a welcome part of that).

I think they were too busy ripping off VMS and mainframe software to send anything the other direction except Tetris

The US government is often eager to impose sanctions on foreign entities it doesn't like. TikTok ban is fundamentally no different from some of the more controversial sanctions, such as those imposed on Cuba and Iran. The only exceptional part is that this time the average American sees the effect in their daily life.

> how can the US government just ban an app? has this ever happened before in US history? what gives the government the right to tell US citizens what apps they can and can't use?

Being a government. They also get to tell you want kind of guns your allowed to have, what kinds of medicines you can take, and how much gas your car uses, and how your home has to be built.

Welcome to the real world, is this your first time here?

None of those obviously correlate to the kinds of websites you’re allowed to visit. The issue is that it’s awfully close to the kind of speech you are “permitted” to be exposed to, which is a slippery slope.

> None of those obviously correlate to the kinds of websites you’re allowed to visit.

They don't have to.

> The issue is that it’s awfully close to the kind of speech you are “permitted” to be exposed to, which is a slippery slope.

It is not. The so-called "free speech" issue with this ban is bullshit and a red herring.

It's happened to gambling and poker services. Some file sharing services. A couple services to anonymize crypto. And I'm sure plenty of others I'm not thinking of right now.