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Comment by onetimemanytime | Hacker News Reader

My guess: National security as in Huawei https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18216988/white-house-huaw...

Let's be realistic, if an app was doing what is alleged here, they should be banned and I'm sure they are provisions to do so without a vote of Congress. Biden campaign was also told to delete TikTok from phones, maybe NSA knows something.

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> if an app was doing what is alleged here, they should be banned

Yep, I also believe that would be in violation of Google/Apple ToS and they would be happy to ban it.

> I'm sure they are provisions to do so without a vote of Congress.

I highly doubt it, and I am waiting to be shown otherwise.

>>I highly doubt it, and I am waiting to be shown otherwise.

I showed it to you, Huawei. USA gives a LOT of power to the President, sanctions, bans etc etc.

Preventing the purchase and import of physical equipment into the US is a lot different than preventing the import of code/speech. I fully understand the former is allowed, but I highly doubt the president possesses the authority to do the latter.

This has been the case since the launch of the App Store. It’s not new. When uploading an app to Apple App Store, you have to do disclosures about cryptography exports.

While I still vehemently believe the crypto export laws are a stinking pile of 1st Amendment violation, we're talking about code import here, and I don't think there's legislative precedent (and certainly not executive) to enact something like this.

This has happened multiple times before. The forced selling of Grindr back to US ownership from Chinese ownership was the most recent example.

The US prevented the export of code/speech for decades, in fact I’m fairly sure it’s illegal to import recordings of certain speech.

So, there federal government will not be allowed to use TikTok? That's not much of a "ban".

If TikTok is put on the Entities List (doesn’t require congressional review), then Apple and Google will be banned from doing business with TikTok. This forces TikTok off the App Store and Play Store, effectively killing the app globally.

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