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Comment by chme | Hacker News Reader

I guess that TikTok will be forced to deny connections and app stores will be forced to blacklist the app from any IP addresses from the US or they get sued.

Central blocking on DNS side etc. is unlikely.

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It's a Chinese company, why would they care about the US trying to sue them? The US will need to block, remove, and sanction.

There are many options, all depends on how important it is for the US. Freezing assets, diplomatic options, ...

Which the US can do. Being "in the US" means that they take in dollars from US sources. To take dollars from US sources, they will have to work with US institutions, which will all banned from working with them.

Sure, they could accept money from people in US through Bitcoin, but I don't think they business would be exactly viable if that's their payment model.

Absolutely. My point was the US trying to "sue" a Chinese company is an utterly pointless endeavor.

Well, it's suing its US incarnation, which should be some sort of LLC or Corporation. The US can certainly get rid of that, which will both significantly defund the Chinese company and eliminate its US presence (and vastly reduce the data collection of US sources which is in theory the motivation for this whole story).

> It's a Chinese company, why would they care about the US trying to sue them?

If they had no physical, legal, and financial presence in the US, then sure, it would be somewhat impossible to sue them.

However, TikTok is registered as a legal business entity in the US, they have employees in the US working for that business entity, they have physical properties (that they likely lease) where said employees work, and they have money going through their US accounts.

In the TikTok scenario specifically, it makes perfect sense to me why and how the US would sue them.

I would assume that would all go away if they get banned, which brings you back to hard to sue them?

I would assume yes, but it will all depend on how that corporate wind-down would go down. And I have zero idea how that goes, because it isn’t like TikTok assets and corporate liabilities just go poof overnight in the US on the day of the ban. They gotta be winded down somehow, and I am afraid that level of detail is significantly above my paygrade.

Also, I am not even sure that this applies here, as I couldnt even find anything about the US government suing TikTok. All I could find was that TikTok is the one that filed with the US courts to fight the bill that is getting them banned, i.e., they are the ones actually suing the US government[0].

0. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...

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