Comment by ddp26 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddp26 | Hacker News Reader

I looked into this, and here's what I think will happen [copied from another thread where I posted this]:

  - ByteDance will challenge the ruling in court (>95%), but they will lose (80%)

  - They then will succeed in selling TikTok US to a US company, despite what ByteDance execs and China are saying (75%)

  - The sale will be for $30-50B (CI 50%), it won't include important ByteDance IP that will have to be recreated by a US-based company, likely Snap or X.

  - Walmart and Oracle won’t compete to buy it this time. Microsoft or Amazon are the top contenders, also quite likely is a consortium led by someone like Steven Mnuchin.

Rationales for the above in https://github.com/varunaai/tiktok-ban

This is like the most plebeian take on this topic. This is what one would believe if they took mainstream discourse (press statements and all) at face value without assessing it critically.

>The sale will be for $30-50B (CI 50%), it won't include important ByteDance IP that will have to be recreated by a US-based company, likely Snap or X.

Why replicate it? Can't ByteDance license the IP to the US company?

Maybe. Steve Mnuchin said he wants to partner with an AI company to replicate it. The CCP might prevent ByteDance from licensing it?

The law doesn't technically prohibit this, but the President has to sign off before the app becomes un-banned, and the law does specifically call out "any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm" as the type of thing that the executive might take into account. So just renting a black-box recommender from ByteDance would likely be a no go.

it will have to be bought by a US company. The US company will have to be connected to the govt. The gears are already turning to make sure it happens just like they planned. Why else is Steve interested??

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