> The United States here feels entitled to own and run an app used on every continent of the world.

This isn’t correct. The US law only applies to the services provided within the US.

ByteDance could spin out the US userbase while retaining the rest of the userbase. Many US companies already have to do exactly this for their Chinese userbase. Spin it off to a JV with a Chinese partner.

I’m not aware of anyone doing this, but you could even have a content syndication model whereby the global TikTok and the US TikTok share a common pool of content and username reservations so that both services appear global to their users, but with separate companies controlling distribution of their own apps and the recommendation model used to serve content.