Comment by swatcoder
4 days ago
TikTok is ostensibly a commercial product meant to earn revenue that offset costs, and those costs are tremendous.
Meanwhile, the ban will make it impossible for them to (a) enter into trade relationships with the advertisers and other partners that bring in revenu, and (b) share that revenue with monetized users.
Continuing to run it at scale as a website without ads or monetization payouts (and without any legal protections) would pretty well blow the cover of it being a legitimate international business.
That makes sense, but means that banning it from making money through (a) and (b) would be sufficient to kill it quickly (if it's a legitimate business, as you said), without directly taking it away from users and causing so much political uproar.
That amounts to the same thing and ByteDance would present it as the same thing in their PR effort, so nothing material would be different.
Meanwhile, the kind of law that would allow a business to "operate" but disallow it from making money is probably close to unprecedented and would look like even more peculiar targeting. It doesn't really even make sense as operating a business naturally implies participating in commerce.