The closest precedent for this ban are laws banning foreign ownership of TV stations.
But TV has always been national. How is global social media supposed to work when every government demands to have its own version, controlled by a local company?
Do these representatives imagine a truly separate version of TikTok, like China's Douyin, without access to foreign content, and without anyone else seeing american content, without any connections between american and foreign users? Does the US want to separate itself from the world like that? China has a long tradition of this kind of separation, the US doesn't.
The bill doesn't block any content on Tiktok, it is to require American ownership of the company. The penalty for non-compliance would remove Tiktok from appstores, but it wouldn't prevent Americans from accessing it either via the web (Probably easy to sideload on Android at least).
But TV has always been national. How is global social media supposed to work when every government demands to have its own version, controlled by a local company?
Do these representatives imagine a truly separate version of TikTok, like China's Douyin, without access to foreign content, and without anyone else seeing american content, without any connections between american and foreign users? Does the US want to separate itself from the world like that? China has a long tradition of this kind of separation, the US doesn't.