So they want to ban only the mobile app, but the Tiktok website would still work from the mobile browsers? Huh... I guess they can get less user data from the website than an app, but the content manipulation and the usage data collection could still happen that way if that's the real fear of the US...
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 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.
This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?
[I made the same comment elsewhere, but I'm putting it here too because I'm really puzzled by this.]