It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps where a company is headquartered in, or has more than a 20% ownership share of the company held, in a country that has been determined to be a foreign adversary.
It is much, much broader than a 'tiktok ban', it applies to any company that fits that criteria. So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company. It's not just a ban, it simply won't exist on the internet for US users.
There are probably a bunch of companies that will be subject to this if it's upheld in court, and the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet. It'll also likely result in Chinese interests devesting down to >20% from US companies that they do not want banned, for much the same reasons.
Basically, this is the result of a bunch of tech-illiterate politicians who have no idea how any of this works, passing a law that looks good in news headlines without regard to the potential consequences. So business as usual on the hill.
As people are pointing out, no. This isn't a blanket law, it requires per-case executive action to enforce.
What the law absolutely does do is make "Chinese Ownership" an existential risk to companies with software products with large numbers of US users. Riot, Epic et. al. will be strongly incentivised to get their PRC shareholders to divest, and in the future other companies will be disincentivized from accepting that kind of investment.
> So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company.
Provided they have more than 1 million MAU (which they do, obviously). The president would also have to affirmatively ban it and report to Congress about the specific threat that company poses, and what assets need to be divested. TikTok is the only company written into the bill by Congress that doesn't require affirmative action by the president, or the report.
> the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet
Only if the president believes they should be banned.
1 million MAU is nothing. Throw up AdSense on something that gets 1m MAU and that pays for a single developer. Also, I don't like the President getting this kind of power over businesses. It's bad enough when they can make angry Twitter threats... now they can give them a corporate death penalty.
Sure, that's a valid concern to have, and I'm not saying the bill is a great idea. I'm just pointing out that there's nothing automatic about the process and the clock to divestment wouldn't immediately start ticking the moment a company crosses 20% Chinese ownership. The person I was responding to said the bill could get weaponized by the CCP to ban things via the threat of them acquiring more than 20% ownership, but that's not how the bill works.
It is much, much broader than a 'tiktok ban', it applies to any company that fits that criteria. So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company. It's not just a ban, it simply won't exist on the internet for US users.
There are probably a bunch of companies that will be subject to this if it's upheld in court, and the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet. It'll also likely result in Chinese interests devesting down to >20% from US companies that they do not want banned, for much the same reasons.
Basically, this is the result of a bunch of tech-illiterate politicians who have no idea how any of this works, passing a law that looks good in news headlines without regard to the potential consequences. So business as usual on the hill.