But what if the EU bans the US Tik Tok ban? What is Apple supposed to do then? Also people will just skirt the laws and find a way to access Tik Tok with a VPN or something like that! I see a slippery slope in every direction!
Let me dispel anyone’s doubt as to the legality and Constitutionality of this law. Do you know what sanctions are? There are sanctions in place on entities all over the world whether they be countries, companies, or individuals such as Russian oligarchs. Sanctions are directives by the president, who is authorized under US law, to stop anyone from doing business with the sanctioned entity. Those sanctions can have different scopes. The entity can be forbidden from doing business with any American company or sanctions can be enforced worldwide. When sanctions are issued by the president, there is a list of all companies and persons who are being sanctioned. It doesn’t just say, for instance, that you can’t do business with Russia. It would say here are all the Russian companies and individuals on the list. An attempt to sanction a whole country would end up being a very, very long list. As a result of the Ukraine war, the president placed sanctions on numerous entities including banks, oil companies, and oligarchs who often have businesses all around the world. But that list is not exhaustive. There are still many companies and individuals in Russia who are not on the list.
How are these sanctions enforced? Fines or jail time. Any US entity that does business with the sanctioned entity is fined. Does this sound familiar with the TikTok situation? This law is essentially a sanction, something done all the time.
As to your question about foreign governments, this particular law does not extend beyond the US. TikTok is free to do business with other countries all it wants. Apple is free to host the TikTok app in the EU, for instance, but not here if the sanction is placed. But this is how sanctions are enforced if the president decides to enforce it worldwide. I’ll use the example of Iran with regards to their selling oil. Under the prior Administration, Iran was forbidden to sell oil except for humanitarian reasons, to feed their people, for example. This was enforced by fines. No country or business could do business by buying oil from Iranian oil companies without being hit with the penalty that US firms would then be forbidden to do business with them. The president essentially gives foreign companies a choice. Do business with Iran or with the United States. Can’t do business with both. The US government would enforce that by fining American companies who would seek to break sanctions. Those types of sanctions work because foreign companies interested in making money would be insane to choose Iran over the US. The US could not do something like this without having the worldwide economic power it does.
If the law had indeed been extended worldwide for some reason and in your scenario the EU passed a law to defy those sanctions, Apple would have a choice of facing fines in the US and being forbidden from doing business with any US company or having the same penalty in the EU. They’d have a choice to either pull out of the EU or have their home business essentially killed. That answer would be easy. They’d be forced to pull out of the EU. But that’s completely hypothetical since it’s likely the EU would back a US ban on TikTok. Many EU nations have already followed suit by banning TikTok from government devices, so those countries are sympathetic to the argument that ByteDance is a security risk. It would be totally legal if the US tried to enforce a ban worldwide and American companies were faced with conflicting laws in other countries, but it would create a dilemma for them. The most likely result of such a scenario would be for the US and EU to negotiate a settlement, possibly by giving Apple an exemption from the sanctions.
This bill is nothing more than sanctions against ByteDance and TikTok. TikTok is forbidden to do business as long as it is owned by a sanctioned company. Now TikTok isn’t specifically mentioned, but the parameters of the law directly point at the company and Biden has said he will use it against TikTok. Since this is done all the time, this would easily pass Consitutional muster and anyone filing suit against the law would almost certainly lose unless they found some loophole in the law.
