After a long respite from serious congressional scrutiny, lawmakers are taking another shot at getting TikTok to sever ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
If enacted, the bill would impose a civil penalty on app stores and web hosting services that distribute TikTok and other covered services, unless the app is separated from Chinese ownership. The penalty for an app store that violates the law would be calculated by multiplying the number of U.S. users who “accessed, maintained, or updated” the foreign adversary app by $5,000. The U.S. attorney general would enforce the bill.
It also creates a process for the president to designate other social media companies from foreign adversary countries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as subject to the bill, meaning that applications owned by designated companies that are distributed in the The US would have to cut themselves off. links to continue operating there.
However, concerns about the scope of the RESTRICT Act and the authority it would give to the executive branch ultimately paralyzed the movement on the issue.
The new legislation was drafted in an attempt to avoid potential constitutional concerns. For example, although it names ByteDance, it is designed to avoid being seen as a penalty to an individual company. This is partly because the bill allows a period of 165 days for ByteDance to avoid a ban on its apps if it sells them during that time; It also creates a process by which it could be applied to other applications.
While TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, it has maintained that it keeps U.S. user data on servers outside the country and is working on plans to put U.S. data even further out of the hands of China-based ByteDance employees. . Many lawmakers have expressed concern that China's national security law could force ByteDance to hand over information about American users if they have access to it.
Despite bipartisan concern, it remains an important question whether any action to divest or ban TikTok can reignite momentum during an election year, especially one in which TikTok is a useful tool for candidates hoping to secure their seats.
