TikTok’s bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.
The social media company had hoped a federal appeals court would agree with its argument that the law was unconstitutional because it represented a “staggering” impact on the free speech of its 170 million US users.
But the court upheld the law, which it said “was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents”.
[…]
The court agreed the law was “carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC (People’s Republic of China).”
How does this functionally work?
the primary source of this is annoyingly hard to track down for legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President.
it turns out that’s because it was part of H.R.815 - “Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes.”
if you want to read the actual text of the law, this PDF starting on page 61.
the gist is that it’s illegal to:
everyone calls this a “ban on TikTok” and it kinda annoys the shit out of me, because as far as I can tell, the website tiktok.com is probably still going to be available in the US.
what this law actually does is require Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, for US-based users. and makes them subject to a fine of $5000 per user if they don’t comply.
I’m generally in favor of more regulation of tech companies…but this is a really fucking stupid way to do it.
They won’t be able to continue running their business in the US, so likely they won’t be able to continue working with US cloud providers. But there’s nothing stopping them from hosting it somewhere else and allowing US users to still connect, but all the commerce options are going to be useless at that point.