TikTok says Trump administration ban is based on fake news about the app and its back end TikTok has claimed that the Trump administration’s reasons for wanting it banned are mostly based on incorrect assumptions about its technology. The claims were made in a supplemental declaration [PDF] filed as part of the made-in-China social network’s legal action seeking to undo the USA’s ban on the app. Featuring the …
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It's NEVER that simple in real life business. You pull out of a market, even if only temporarily, you lose the market penetration headway that you might have spent years building - customers don't wait for you to come back, your return and their commitment to you both become an unknown entity. They move to a new supplier as quick as they can; this is why companies hold just about any news not seen as 100% positive as close to the chest as possible, for as long as possible.
The market is finicky. It doesn't wait up for you, especially in the world of trends. Apps are trendy, they can come and go after a fashion, especially with the younger market where TikTok targets.
SG Trump ay or may not be on hisvway out but he has set precedents that are nto going to go away completely. Whatever colour the next prez has on their lapel, they are all tarred withthe same brush regarding the way the US deals with the rest of the world.
The biggest difference is that previous incumbents have been more or less subtle
OK, so they meet today's internet standards, if you use a phone (even if you don't have any apps on it) then you are being tracked. Meanwhile all of the five eyes countries are saying that all communications need to have backdoors - is this the problem, TikTok doesn't meet the backdoor standard yet?
I'd love to know, if indeed TikTok is a "national security risk", why people who actually need the security are simply told not to use it, banning it for them, rather than banning it for everyone in general.
Oh. Maybe I've answered my own question. Spreading FUD is easier for the PTB than actually creating a real fix.
There are some grounds for asking by what authority the Executive Branch can just ban commerce on a whim. The answer is buried in some enabling legislation that was passed in haste that gives wide powers to the President and has no sunset clause. This is yet more fallout from 9/11 and comes from the rather naive time when everyone must have thought that 'nobody would ever do this'. We just don't seem to learn. -- enabling legislation has a poor track record. Possibly the most notorious example was the German version from March 1933 which paved the way for Nazi party rule. (Even that had a sunset clause but by the time the act needed renewal it was too late to rein in the executive.)
The ban on TikTok needs opposing not just because its based on flawed technical reasoning -- we can argue about the minutiae of where data is held till the cows come home but its largely irrelevant -- but because we've got government overreach interfering with legitmate commerce purely on ideological grounds. There's also a good reason to suspect that this is going to be ineffective -- sure Larry Ellison (a Trump supporter) might benefit personally from an Oracle deal but these bans and sanctions, especially in the semiconductor industry, are proving to be doing far more harm than good. (SMIC is on track -- as the announced last March -- to deliver a 7nM process, for example. Government interference that gives the illusion of 'winning' in the short term only serves to provide the momentum for a permanent supply chain shift.)(We don't have the resources to move the supply chain back as it is, how on earth do we expect to do this after the shift?)
What is or is not legal will in the long term pan out. The timescales that bad decisions get corrected do not match up, though. You can technically go to court and get an order, yada yada yada... but that'll take a few months at least.
The point of having a Government, and an Opposition to that government, is to fully debate the pros and cons, look for alternatives, and then "make the right decision". People have kind-of forgotten that...
...if the US government could actually enforce this. It sounds like the sort of thing that would be stuck in 1st Amendment court cases for decades.
Maybe they would just get Fox News to tell Trump that the App was blocked, and do NADA. That's pretty much what I think is going on in US government at the moment anyway - call Fox news, ask them to broadcast what the president needs to do next...
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