I feel like they've got a strong constitutional case. One BBC article I read said that 60% of their company ownership is by global hedge funds so they just plainly aren't a Chinese company. Singling them out for having dissident information through an act of congress is precisely what the 1st Amendment is supposed to protect against. With the sale supposed to happen in November at the earliest, the red scare will either fade by then or become a much larger issue they can capitalise on.
This is simply one of the first steps towards US-China decoupling.
The US knows that it cannot contain China, cannot stop China from technologically surpassing itself. But the US still controls the global tech industry market, and China is still distances from transitioning away an export-led economy.
That’s why the US is specifically targeting Huawei. These targets were very specifically and strategically chosen. They want Huawei to succeed in developing their native technology and architectures, so down the road the US can simply force the rest of the world to choose between Apple/Google ecosystems, or the Chinese Harmony ecosystem, citing technical incompatibility between the two (many US government agencies already have a strict requirement regarding technology use involving Chinese components).
The global tech sector has far too much invested in and have their entire operations built around the existing Apple/Google/Amazon ecosystems so it will become very painful and costly to make the switch even if a superior Chinese alternative is available. At the end of the day, if you want to earn dollars, as a business, you’d have to weigh how much you’d be willing to risk losing (especially against your competitors) when the US declares that use of native Chinese technology is no longer accepted in your business dealing with them.
This Tiktok debacle is really just setting up the legal precedences for what they actually intend to commit to in their strategic planning down the road.
To understand the landlord empire, you need to think like a landlord. Microsoft did not dominate the consumer market because they made the best products, but because they were the best at using legal means to stop their competitors from penetrating the market.
If you don't allow the political and invsstment oligarchs control your media outlet, they will either force you to shut down or surrender to an investment oligarch.
This might be sincere, but as someone who worked in M&A in a past life, it’s pretty standard to say “I’m not interested in selling” to bluff the price up a bit.
ByteDance is a private profit-maximising company. What would make most financial sense to them now?
Leave the profitable US market and continue with less revenue
Sell everything at fire sale prices to oligarchs connected to the US regime
Somehow split into a TikTok for the free world and one for Burgerland and just sell the latter to the US oligarchs, thereby exposing their algorithms to the yanks.
And is it likely that the Chinese government would be intervening to get one outcome over another?