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crazylogger | on: TikTok goes dark in the US
The funny thing here is that complying means they never do business in the US anyway. So potentially it is beneficial for Bytedance to still serve US viewers but keep no physical presence in the US, and deal only with non-American advertisers (e.g. US viewer see ads from SHEIN, Aliexpress, Ctrip, etc.) and still profit from this operation. Those companies will pay Bytedance in China, outside US control.

This is pretty much how US internet services operate in the rest of the world: YouTube have no physical presence in, say, Nigeria, but Nigerians watch YouTube just fine. That’s what the internet was all about. We’re connected by default, unless a government actively implements a firewall to stop it.

genocidicbunny | parent
> Those companies will pay Bytedance in China, outside US control.

Then they are also likely to find themselves banned. Pretty silly to think the US would just throw up its hands and go "oh, you found the loophole, congrats, you win!"

Complying with the ban doesn't just mean that ByteDance can't do business in the US. It means other entities that might have a US presence also can't do business with them without risking being treated the same. I doubt Shein, Ali...etc will want to risk being kicked out of the US market for ByteDance's benefit.

LinuxBender | root | parent
Pretty silly to think the US would just throw up its hands and go "oh, you found the loophole, congrats, you win!"

Agreed. It would be an act or law passed to force ISP's to null route anything to ByteDance networks and if they play whack-a-mole then it would just be a great-wall null route of China.

crazylogger | root | parent
Yes, this is the point made by the root-level comment: the US would have to build Chinese style Great Firewall to achieve its goal if Bytedance didn't willingly take down their sites.

In my understanding this law in question requires US-based app stores and ISPs to stop hosting for Bytedance. Assuming they comply with this fully, your packets can still reach arbitrary address in China due to the technical nature of the Internet. US would have to examine every outgoing packet and block a lot of organizations' IPs around the world (e.g. a Brazillian CDN that has no presence in the US) to make Tiktok inaccessible.

It's very much a technical problem is the point I was making. Significant portion of Chinese users bypass the ban to access American services. There is a wide spectrum of possible GFW implementations the US can choose from. Anything short of the North Korean one, Tiktok is not going to be completely banned.

Case in point: I saw another commenter managed to access Tiktok by remotely operating a Windows server located in Canada, should their ISP / cloud provider they rented server from / Tiktok Canada be held liable for serving this user? What about users who simply alter their DNS / use socks proxy / VPNs to gain access? The US could develop technology to ban all this, then it would end up exactly the same as China.

genocidicbunny | root | parent
The US wouldn't have to do that, they can go after the financial side of the business. They could prosecute or make the lives of any persons involved with these companies very difficult financially. Imagine trying to do business in the US when no credit card processors, banks, or other financial institutions will touch you with a mile-long pole. Now imagine facing that not as a company, but as an individual; How comfortable of a life do you think you'd have as a person living in the US and being unable to access practically any financial institution? And even outside the US, how many companies with a US presence would kick you out to avoid Uncle Sam paying them a visit?

It's only partially a technical problem -- most of the issue lies in the rubber hose.