Comment on TikTok's CEO is feeling the pressure and users are freaking out
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 6 months agoEither TikTok will win in court and overrun the law (possible), be sold (unlikely) or shut down (likely).
Multiple competitors will appear in the meantime hoping to get the displaced activity. TikTok is hugely profitable and a dominant replacement in the US would make a lot of money. This will be seen as an opportunity to make a lot of money for the winner.
I can see Meta trying to make a TikTok like clone, Google trying to leverage YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk trying to revive Vine at Twitter, plus lots of startups vying to win the audience.
The deadline is after the US election - this could also all be political grandstanding and the politicians expectation might be that the law won’t stand up in court anyway.
match@pawb.social 6 months ago
TikTok has hundreds of millions of users outside the US, they may just pull out [and then US users will VPN to use it like we’re fucking Iran]
OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
VPNs aren’t that hard, but I feel like you overestimate the technical literacy of the general public in the US.
Buttons@programming.dev 6 months ago
All the public will have to do is type “tiktok.com” in their browser and their computer will connect to directly to servers in China.
Then our politicians will start discussing a national firewall. We’ll show that we’re better than China by doing the same things China would do (/s).
Woozythebear@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If you can use tik tok you can use a VPN. I click my VPN to start it and it auto connects. You think tapping 1 button on your phone is too hard for people who tap one button on their phone to open tik tok?
small44@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Doesn’t the bill include fines for using tiktok with a vpn?
Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 6 months ago
unless the bill has changed since the last time I read it, there were fines for hosting the service in US datacenters, and fines for companies allowing US data to exist in non-us datacenters. I don’t think you could interpret the bill as imposing a civil penalty to a user using a vpn and accessing it.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Exactly. I read Division H of the bill (the more important to me), and civilians would only be impacted if they distribute a banned app or something. ISPs could potentially be culpable though, but I’m pretty sure that’s related to hosting the infra for something like TikTok and not just allowing traffic to it.
So yeah, using a VPN with TikTok would totally work. Not sure if you could get updates to the app over VPN though, that depends on how the stores handle regions.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Not that I saw.