"My concerns about the TikTok divestiture bill as a software researcher/developer."
"First, this bill isn't actually aiming to ban TikTok. It really wants to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to someone else who is not controlled by China. It does that by threatening to make it illegal to distribute the TikTok app to Americans unless ByteDance sells TikTok within 180 days of the law taking effect."
"I think what the bill is trying to say is that if ByteDance doesn't sell TikTok, US based app stores have to take down TikTok for US users and US web hosts must not host the TikTok web app for US users. Unfortunately, when I read the text, that's not actually what they have said, because the Internet is complicated and it's hard to write clear rules about it without causing unintended consequences."
"There has been previous attempts by US states, most notably in Montana, to ban TikTok that have been struck down by courts as unconstitutional, because they violate the First Amendment."
"How the bill defines 'hosting services' would seem to reach pretty far into the infrastructure of the Internet to effect its prohibitions."
"The way I read this, I think it would require Verisign to de-platform the domain 'tiktok.com' from the '.com' name servers."
"A related over-broadness concern I have is whether this bill would effect 'peering', or in other words, whether it would prohibit US Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from routing traffic to a TikTok service hosted abroad."
"US law already has the concept of the 'Specifically Designated Nationals list' (SDN list), which is a list of companies and people that US persons and businesses are prohibited from doing business with."
"Another concern I have with this bill is the open-ended nature of the ability to designate other apps as 'foreign adversary controlled applications'."
"I think this definition would cover Telegram, the very popular Russian app whose use is very significant in monitoring ransomware actors and in open-source intelligence of Russian military operations."
My concerns about the TikTok divestiture bill as a software researcher/developer.
