This is the wrong tack, anyway.
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?)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
