this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Essentially yea, the laws enforcement mechanism as-is is just having the app delisted from app stores
Everything else is of TikToks own doing
And that’s all it should be. Currently, the US government does not have the facilities to block traffic to specific websites or IP addresses on a country-wide basis. We don’t have a “great firewall” the way China does, and we should keep it that way.
Yes it does? All it would take is a single piece of legislation and a couple of hours for all ISPs to block all traffic to certain IP ranges.
Sure, it doesn't prevent VPNs but it would block 95% of access. The remaining 5% can be blocked through banning VPNs and deep packet inspection, the latter of which doesn't require that much new infrastructure.
Idk why you are downvoted. They have that yes
Except banning vpns would kill the economy immediately. Pretty much every big corporation is utilizing vpns to facilitate their work from home infrastructure. Hell, often even internally. Not to mention state and federal governments also use them. Suggesting they could do that is a joke.
From what I understand, in my country OpenVPN and Wireguard work fine within the borders, but the protocols are blocked to foreign servers.
I wasn't talking about the technology behind VPNs. Every single country that "bans VPNs" still uses them commercially to some extent.
What I consider a ban on VPNs is a ban on commercial B2C VPN providers that do not comply with US legislation - meaning they'd allow customers to access banned sites.
Add the fact that pretty much all major payment providers happen to be US companies and I'd wager 99% of "normal" access could be blocked.
They'll just make legal carveouts for government and commercial use, and go after consumer-facing VPN providers that refuse to comply. For VPN providers based outside the US, they could delist their websites from DNS or block their IPs. They can't stop someone who's determined from finding a way, of course, but just a few simple barriers prevents most people from putting in the effort.
That many carveouts pretty much renders the entire thing pointless.
Are you seriously trying to predict the actions of the US federal government using an argument based on logic and common sense?
No, I'm trying to predict when their corporate overloads would tell them to sit the fuck down.
False, feds have taken down whole domains for violations
Actually...
I think if people in the US had the capacity for introspection and empathy we would have had a collective
moment every year for the past 250y...
I completely misunderstood the ban then. If you go back and read my previous thoughts on the matter, I debated IF this was good or bad.
And my debate was, do you allow actual spy services to keep spying in your country? Or do you ban the services, and introduce a precident which could easily be used towards a government lockdown of services?
And ultimately I landed of the belief that we shouldn't ban tiktok. But that was under the assumption that it was a nationwide services ban. Not just a delisting from the app store.
Tiktok can still host the apk on their own website. Any other installations already installed on apple devices would still work. This isn't a ban. It's an app store delisting. And that's fine. That initself doesn't fly against the concepts of net neutrality. It becomes a matter of availability at that point.
And if tiktok is doing this of their own choice, then that doesn't go against net neutrality either. That's YOUR choice (if you are tiktok).
So, yeah. This small clarification really made this "debate" not much of a debate to me anymore. Ignore all previous positions I held. This issue just became simple. Fuck tiktok. Thats on them. The government didn't ban them. They delisted an app.
Childporn is illegal on any network. As well it should be. Tiktok is not illegal as a result of this "ban". That's what I thought was happening. It's not (assuming you are correct, which I have no reason to doubt).
(Edit 2: read the bill, it also bans American companies from offering hosting services to a company that is banned through the law https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text)
Arguably, if the app isn't easy to obtain then the cost of all the US-based servers would become an enormous expense. All US customer data is on its own US-based infra hosted by Oracle. Migrating all the US data elsewhere would also be an enormous expense. Server infa for 170 million Americans on an App is not gonna be cheap to keep running, esp since even if tiktok tried, the best they could do is get apk's to android users. iOS users are SOL.
Given how iOS dominates the US still and only a small portion of android users are comfortable manually installing apps from non-store locations, why would they go through the effort to stay around for a fraction of the previous user base.
Its a perfectly uneerstsndable business decision, and its one they may be making on the hopes thay the ban will get reversed shortly after its put in place. Its also perfectly understandable to not want to sell the US-based component of the App when they still operate in plenty of other countries, including China, and the sale would devalue what they retained.
(Edit: and while their web offering has improved over the years, they probably are assuming a similar drop of userbase since only so many would be willing to move their usage to a web app that is not super easy to use for capturing video or handling notifications)
Why not read it? It is a ban and no it's not a delisting