REVIEW - Tiktok Action May Be Win For Trump, But Not For Independence Of Internet

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th August, 2020) Chinese video app giant TikTok after months of pressure from the White House, is considering selling its US operations to microsoft in a victory President Donald Trump will likely tout on his reelection campaign, though the outcome itself might be a loss for the independence of the internet in America.

"The Chinese dictatorship blocks Facebook, Twitter, and other foreign social media because its leadership doesn't have the guts to allow its people to decide what they want to say, post, or watch," Michael Schuman, author of 'Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World', wrote in a recent commentary in The Atlantic.

STATE WILL DETERMINE WHAT INDIVIDUALS CAN DO ON THE INTERNET

"The motivation for blocking TikTok in the US is much different, of course, but takes us to the same place - where the state determines what we can and cannot do on the Internet," Schuman said. "That puts the American government in the impossible position of defending our values by undermining them. That can't be the best way to confront our fears."

Morningconsult.com said one-third of the 2,200 US adults surveyed on the Trump administration's proposed ban on Tiktok opposed the action against the video sharing platform that allowed one to film themselves dancing in your living room, lip-synching jokes, capturing animal antics, and share other slivers of personal life.

Interestingly, some 29 percent, a constituency just slightly smaller than the majority, supported the ban, Morningconsult said, adding that the respondents were probably drawn along political lines - Trump's supporters favored the action and his rivals opposed it. But among generational lines, Gen Z, the video-sharing service's key audience, was most opposed to a ban, at 59 percent, it said.

Microsoft said on Monday it plans to finish negotiations with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, on the purchase of the Chinese-based video-sharing app no later than September 15 - the deadline given by Trump for the company to sell itself to a US interest or be banned altogether in the United States on privacy concerns.

"I don't mind if... Microsoft or somebody else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company buys it," Trump told reporters.

TRUMP DETERMINES BOTH DEADLINE AND WHAT TREASURY SHOULD GET FROM DEAL

The president added that a "substantial portion" of the sale's proceeds, speculated in US media to be as high as $50 billion, should go to the US Treasury - an unusual demand despite his justification that it was his administration that made the deal possible.

"I did say that if you buy it, whatever the price is that goes to whoever owns it, because I guess it's China essentially ... I said a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States because we're making it possible for this deal to happen," Trump said.

Microsoft and TikTok parent ByteDance gave the US government a notice of intent to explore a preliminary proposal for Microsoft to purchase the TikTok service in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Britain's Sun newspaper, meanwhile, quoted a spokesperson for ByteDance as saying the company was also considering moving its headquarters to London, where US tech giants such as Google and Facebook have a strong presence.

Even Trump's political rivals seemed to back the deal, indicating what could be a rare bipartisan win for the president.

"A US company should buy TikTok so everyone can keep using it and your data is safe," Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on Twitter, adding: "This is about privacy. With TikTok in China, it's subject to Chinese Communist Party laws that may require handing over data to their government."

SOME IN TRUMP'S INNER CIRCLE REMAIN WORRIED ABOUT TIKTOK AFTER SALE

But within the White House, some were airing their doubts. Peter Navarro, a close adviser to the president, particularly on all matters China, said a Microsoft-TikTok deal did not automatically eliminate the threat of China's surveillance on all things American.

Navarro argues that China's civil and military fusion requires any foreign company operating on Chinese soil to give them their data, he said.

So the question, Navarro adds, is whether it is prudent to sell TikTok to any company with operations in China that might be compromised and thereby "get us into the same problem we have now."

"Microsoft through its Bing search engine... now operates in China through Skype calls that effectively are enablers of Chinese censorship surveillance and monitoring. Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco [and] other American companies in the tech land help China build its great firewall, which is used basically... to imprison Chinese citizens," Navarro told Fox news when asked if the deal should go through. "Can we trust any company that operates in China, has servers [and] software in China, to protect your children? That's a question I think that needs to be asked."

INFLECTION POINT IN US-CHINA TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH

Schuman said TikTok's fate will tell if China could continue its historic rise and challenge American political and economic primacy.

"If geopolitical headwinds stymie [ByteDance CEO] Zhang's [Yiming] ambitions, they could also destroy China's," he said.

But more than that, he said, the controversy offered a window into American and Chinese societies at this crucial moment: No other Chinese company has woven itself so intimately into American life, and in an age of intrusive technologies, Big Data, and heightened foreign threats, both of Washington and Beijing's ideals were being put to test by this one app.

"We're at this inflection point," Samm Sacks, an expert in China and cybersecurity at the think tank New America, was quoted as saying in the same Atlantic commentary.

"Can we maintain the openness that has been one of our greatest strengths but protect ourselves with technology in everything? Right now the rules are being written in real time," he concluded.